Happy New Year – 2025
Welcome back everyone! We also welcome 3 new families to our nursery – Lyra, Navy and Ronan. The children have made them feel very welcome and are helping them settle in to our nursery. We have a very busy half term ahead of us!
Jack Frost is About!
The weather was just perfect for our first Forest Friday! We shared the story of Jack Frost by Kazuno Kohara. A lovely story of a little boy who is lonely during winter and makes friends with Jack Frost. Through the story we looked at cold colours, thought about why Jack Frost didn’t like warm things and frosty patterns.
In our forest we joined sticks together to make a snowflake shape then added sparkles to them. Then we used runny glue to dribble a pattern onto the black paper. we used fingers and thumbs to sprinkle the glitter on top, creating frosty patterns, just like Jack frost left on the windows in the story.
We also explored the shapes of ice that had formed in the mud kitchen trays and played a ‘We’re Going on a Polar Bear Hunt’ interactive game to get warm!
Amazing Animals
This week in our nursery we had the opportunity to experience ‘Amanda’s Animals’. She brought in some reptiles- snakes, lizards and a ghecco. We could observe how they moved, noticed their skins, patterns and Amanda told us lots of facts about them.
Following our focus book ‘The Gruffalo’ we have looked at forest animals. On forest Friday we looked at the animals footprints and then found them in our forest, matching them to the correct animal.
Oh no! It’s the Gruffalo!
Our focus book has been The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. We have painted our own Gruffalo’s, cutting out it’s pointy purple prickles!
“It’s a triangle, it has 3 sides.” Evie
We used the apparatus to make our own version of ‘We’re Going on a Gruffalo hunt!’ following the story and then using the props to retell the story. Libby was great at remembering what the little mouse said in the story.
“Well don’t you know, there’s no such thing as a Gruffalo!”
We learned about other woodland animals and became ‘woodland explorers’, using explorer’s equipment – binoculars, compass, cameras and torches to find the animals hiding in the nursery.
Kung Hei Fat Choy – Happy New Year!
28th January is when Chinese families celebrate their Lunar or Chinese New Year! This year is the ‘Year of the Snake’ – we learned the story about how the Chinese God’s chose the order of the animal years.
Our role play was transformed into a Chinese family home where we had the opportunity to dress up and pretend to have our own celebration. We made our own dragon’s and created a dragon dance outside.
We looked at Chinese writing – Harper was great at copying the symbols, Kobie painted the number 4 in Chinese writing “it looks like a square!” Libby told us all about her family visiting “a Chinese cafe, where they ate noodles and prawn crackers.” Then we all tried Chinese food, we think the crackers and sauce was the children’s favourite.
Epinay Cafe
Following the children’s interests and making our own role play cafe in the nursery we were excited to broaden our experiences by visiting a working cafe. Epinay School is just up the road to us and is ran by some of the older students. We met the cook Colin.They asked us if we would like orange or blackcurrant juice and if we would like a chocolate crispie cake. We were great at remembering our manners, saying yes please or no thank you. Miss Porter then paid Colin for all of our drinks and cakes.
We had the opportunity to look at some of the artwork the children of the school had produced and also a play in their play area. We hope the children will be able to extend their play based on real life experience.
World Book Day
We were so excited to come to nursery as our favourite characters today. We had lots of superheroes, fairytale characters and TV characters. We have taken part in a book hunt, drawn our characters and thought about which books we would recommend to others and why!
“I love all the Winnie the Witch stories, she has a cat called Wilbur!. I like Winnies New Computer the best.” Evie
“I love books about dinosaurs because I like them!.” Reggie
