It’s been a busy couple of weeks since we came back after our Christmas holidays.

Nursery have welcomed lots of new friends into nursery who have started to settle well and our older children have been doing a great job of role modelling to our new starters. Last week we reminded ourselves of the Nursery Rights Respecting Rules and the ways that we can be good friends to our new children.

At the start of our sessions, as well as doing lots of exercises with dough, scarves and dancing to warm up our bodies and brains, we’ve begun to look at the one of the new stories for this term, Walking Thought the Jungle and reading this story together has helped us with our phonics. We have looked at all the different parts of the book, talked about the characters and setting and predicted which animals we may see next. We have been acting out the story and also making the sounds that the different animals make like sssssss and grrrrrrrrr. To help us to link our letters and sounds, we have also been looking for these and other letters around the nursery, talking about the sounds that they make and having a try at writing the letters too. 

At the end of our sessions, we have made up our own stories using lots of good describing words as we had fun with Tales Toolkit and we have started to sing some new songs that we are going to be practicing through the term. We also did some very important ECO learning about re-cycling. Thank you to everyone who brought in their old cards from Christmas. We did a big sorting job asking ourselves the question ‘are they glittery or not?’ The children learned that we could re-cycle the ones without glitter and those with glitter we are going to up-cycle to make new Christmas decorations!...wow! We also talked about re-using or re-purposing things like plastic bags and sweet containers so that we were not being wasteful. Our Michael recycle story also helped to reinforce this learning too! 

In nursery and the nursery garden we have been modelling and using lots of questions like what, where, when, who, and why? 

We have also been starting to explore mixing colours and finding different ways of watching where the rain goes by sprinkling paint and following it down the trickles of water in the garden. We have had a great time using our new deconstructed role play area which has lots of boxes, tubes, fabric and clips to play imaginatively and create our own new spaces.

We've also really enjoyed sharing with the children their experiences from the Christmas holidays using our Tapestry app...a great way to increase confidence and support speech and language.