We’ve had a real mix of fun and learning at nursery this week.

Our maths focus was counting and cardinality and the children have been using objects and pictures to practice counting reliably. There are lots of things that you have to be able to do to count… saying numbers in order remembering to start at number one and pointing to the objects or pictures as you count, saying one number for each. We’ve also been reminding ourselves that the last number you say when you are counting, tells you how many are in the set.

Tuesday a very busy day. Bemma who originally comes from Africa came in to nursery to talk about African celebrations, clothes and dancing. She showed us African fabrics and we joined in with some fabulous African dancing, dancing like African men, women and also moving like African animals. The children were amazing and learnt lots of new sounds and movements.. it was like a window into another culture. This is so important to raise their awareness of different ways of life around the world and help them to appreciate that everyone is different and special. To follow on from this learning we read Handa’s Surprise and Handa’s Hen stories and made links between the books and the description of life in Africa.

As this week has been Children’s Mental Health Week, we have taken the opportunity to talk with the children the importance of keeping their minds healthy as well as their bodies. It is important for our children to understand that our minds can get poorly as well as our bodies, so it is really important to look after them and help the to stay well. We practised some deep breathing, singing and mindfulness exercises to help us to be calm and relaxed and we made mindfulness bottles in big nursery to watch and support us to focus and calm ourselves. Outside we enjoyed lots of fresh air and exercise, also very good for our mental health. Its good to talk and we reminded and nursery children about the importance of talking about how they feel, some books about different feelings helped us with this as well.

We also continued to sing our core songs and to develop our music and rhythm and practised our Tales Toolkit storytelling, scribing what the children said to value their ideas.
Wow!...what a busy week!