This week at nursery it’s been cold and blowy...both inside and out!

At the start of session in our phonics learning we have revisited the rhythm and the rhyme of our ‘Walking through the Jungle’ story but changed it to write our very own version instead we went ‘Walking through Antarctica.’ This linked with our learning about the friends who have taken our flag to The South Sandwich Islands to investigate the animals and the environment and the effects of climate change and plastic pollution.
We thought about how we might travel around at the Antarctic and moved our bodies in different ways then we looked at some of the animals that we would find there and made the noises that we thought they would make. Some of us even scribed the letters to record the sounds that we made, to help us to learn about the link between sounds and letters.

At the end of our sessions this week we have done a lot of learning about Chinese people celebrating Chinese New Year. We learned the sign for happy New Year and also the sign for rat as this year is the year of the rat. We looked at how people prepare for their celebrations and how they celebrated the event we noticed lots of similarities between Chinese New Year celebrations and our celebrations at Christmas. This learning is a very important part of our British values and rights respecting school learning and helps our children to understand about different types of beliefs and celebrations and everybody’s right celebrate in their own way. During the week in nursery we have also made Chinese lanterns, eaten Chinese food, dressed in Chinese clothes and use chopsticks in the home corner. We made dragon head so that on Friday we could perform our very own dragon dance and the children joined in with dancing, clapping and played instruments in time to a special Chinese music.

On Tuesday we met a real engineer called Ollie and he builds engines for aeroplanes at Rolls Royce!
He told us all about engines and how they work using balloons, a model aeroplane and a PowerPoint with how they put an engine into an aeroplane!
He explained how an engine sucks in the air at the front where the blades are, squeezes it through the middle of the engine and then blows it out the back! This is what makes an aeroplane move! It was a really inspiring day and next week in Super Science we are going to invent our own engines!..how exciting!

Outside in the nursery garden friends have been very busy looking for birds as it has been the RSPB Big Birdwatch We send bird food that we'd made home so that our children can tell us all about what birds they find in their garden at home too.