SUMMER 1

Wow, what a term it has been, full of exciting learning!

We have been thinking about ‘Our World’ and how we can look after it. We talked about Re-using, Repairing, Recycling and Reducing. We learnt about different materials and have found many toys around the Nursery for the teachers to mend. We used plastic bags to make kites to fly in the garden and looked at different ways to get power into our homes. Finally we had a ‘No Electricity Day’. This led to the story ‘Ada Twist Scientist’ where she was always asking questions. There is a board in Nursery where we can place our questions. Examples are;

‘How are cars made’?

‘How are crisps made’?

‘How do you make bread’?

We have been doing lots of work on our emotions. We have read many stories and done lots of lovely activities, these included breathing slowly to make the feather move and ‘Belly Buddies’ was good fun! It has been interesting talking about our emotions and deciding if we are in the blue (sad), yellow (happy), green (calm) or red (angry). This has helped us recognise our feelings and speak about them too using lots of different words like calm, excited and frustrated.

Finally we looked at the ‘Royals’. We played and explored with the castle and palace and found out lots of interesting facts about the Queen and her family. Did you know she now has 4 dogs and one of them is a ‘Dorgi’ (a mix of a dachshund and corgi). She has so many bedrooms in Buckingham Palace (190), we then drew our house and talked about who lived in it and who sleeps in each room.  We helped to create a carriage in the garden, unfortunately it wasn’t made of gold but we loved it, racing around the garden was such fun!

We have drawn lovely self-portraits and made a card for the Queen congratulating her on her Platinum Jubilee. We are awaiting a reply back from Buckingham Palace. We also had good fun learning about coins and stamps and this led to making a shop selling toys in the Nursery.

We have been looking at the bridges over the River Thames in London and then in the Nursery we have built bridges on a small scale using construction toys and outside in the garden we have built bridges in a larger form and with a river running through.  

Outside we also have a weather station where we have been looking at the different types of clouds and catching and measuring rain water.

NURSERY IS SUCH FUN!

SPRING 2

This half term we have been investigating our world around us!

WOW! What a very busy half term we have had, but at least we didn’t get eaten by any of the dinosaurs that we were thinking about!

We knew a little bit about dinosaurs and some of us were lucky enough to go to The Natural History Museum in the holidays. This helped us to build our excitement ready for our learning at Nursery.

We learnt about herbivores and carnivores, some of us even decided that we want to be a palaeontologist when we grow up – what a great job that would be!

We thought about bones and how we can look after our bones by drinking milk and exercising.

We learnt different dinosaur songs and even did dinosaur yoga! We helped our teachers to draw a life size T-Rex on the floor outside – it was as big as the playground! This then led us to look at our own feet and measuring them with cubes.

We also made a fabulous book with everyone’s dinosaur picture inside.

Following this we then decided to learn all about Space.

We learnt that the sun is really a start and looked at the different shapes on the moon.

We looked at the story ‘Whatever Next’ and we loved using our own boxes to take us to the moon for a picnic.

During a session we danced in our own way to space themed music. We moved calmly and quietly.

We have also been working on Philosophy where we have pictures to choose from and we discuss our choices.

Helicopter Stories have been a great hit this half term. The children know to wait for their turn to tell the adult a story. We then help to act our stories out all together at the end of the session, this is always very exciting. Look up ‘Helicopter Stories’ at home and give it a go!

Finally we have been thinking about ‘spring’. We spoke about how the world is changing all around us and how this makes us feel. We looked at the blossom on the trees and all the flowers that are beginning to grow.

We have loved all the wonderful learning at Nursery this half term.

I wonder what we will learn about next?

SPRING 1

This half term we have been thinking about traditional tales.

We began our journey by looking at ‘The Little Red Hen’ ; thinking about team work, especially outside working together to lift and carry the big wooden blocks. We looked at the life cycle of the hen, and how they change. We also made some delicious bread, kneading the dough was really hard work!

Our second story was ‘The Three Little Pigs’. Here we enjoyed building houses using all different types of materials to see which one was the strongest material.

On week 3 we looked at the story of ‘The Enormous Turnip. We thought about sizes and looked at turnip seeds and a real turnip.

We next looked at ‘The Gingerbread Man’, this was very exciting! We had to find the Gingerbread people who were running around in the garden. We made Gingerbread people, they tasted fabulous, and thankfully they didn’t run away!

‘Little Red Riding Hood’ was full of lovely activities. We talked about stranger danger and we did large mark making on the floor to retell the story.

We finished our term with a real favourite, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. We painted pictures of the bears and enjoyed retelling the story. We have learnt about bears and found out that they can run very fast and are good at climbing and swimming.

We have also liked making our own books, mark making in paint, and finding birds in the garden.

Autumn 2

Well, what a busy half term it has been!

Now we are all settled into Nursery life we are remembering the rules and ready to learn lots of new and exiting things.

We started the term off by thinking about Black History. We looked at a lady called Claudia Jones, who created the Notting Hill Carnival. This learning culminated in a wonderful carnival event where we carried out our own carnival procession around the school, playing instruments, shaking material and singing. It was full of colour and excitement!

After all the colourful events of the carnival we then moved on to look at at 'Elmer' and all of his colours. We made our own Elmer's using a milk carton and lots of colourful tissue paper. Once they were finished they looked amazing.  We then looked at the story of 'The Rainbow Fish'. We spoke about what we need to do to be a good friend and that it is always nice to share with our friends. We learnt how to draw a simple fish following some easy steps. We all did an amazing job.

Since starting in September we have all become much more independent. Most of us are now able to put on our own coats and some of us can even zip them up too! As the weather got colder we also worked on putting on our gloves, which can sometimes be a little tricky. We are all very proud of our achievements.

We celebrated and learnt all about Diwali and Mrs Rehinsi spoke to us about how she celebrates at home. We made Diva lamps out of clay and painted them carefully with bright colours. We also learnt about Remembrance Day, making poppies both inside and outside.

We ended the term learning all about Christmas, we read the 'Christmas Story' and acted it out. We took it in turns to be Mary, Joseph, the donkey, and knocking on all the doors to see if there was any room at the inn! We learnt all the songs for our Early Years Nativity, we all did a truly amazing job! We made beautiful decorations for our school tree and did lots of Christmas crafts.

We then enjoyed our Christmas dinner, eating delicious food wearing our crowns that we made especially for the occasion. 

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

We can't wait for all the exciting things we will be learning next half term!

Welcome back to a brand new year at Ainslie Wood Nursery!

This half term we have been very busy welcoming lots of new children into our Nursery. We have made a fantastic start to the year, the children are happy to come in and are ready to learn lots of exciting things. 

Throughout the term we have been learning lots of different Nursery Rhymes, one of our favourites was 'Humpty Dumpty', we built a wall outside and had so much fun singing the song and falling off of the wall just like Humpty Dumpty!

We started this term by looking at our feelings using the story 'The Colour Monster'. This helped us to learn about feeling happy, sad, angry, calm, frightened and love. We spoke about how we feel when we leave our parents and have learnt how to cope independently after being at home for so long.

After this we started to look at our families and who lives in our house. We used the stories 'So Much' and 'Owl Babies' to support us with this. We really enjoyed these books and loved to retell them to the teachers and our friends.

We also learnt about owls. Did you know that owls are nocturnal and that they can turn their heads all the way around? We each made a beautiful owl to go up on our display and said if it was Sarah, Percy or Bill.

We then moved on and started thinking about our Nursery rules like using our walking feet inside, using kind hands and sharing is caring. We looked at the story 'Little Rabbit Foo Foo'. This story was a lot of fun to read, we even learnt a song and actions to go with it using Michael Rosen's video to help us. 

Finally we looked at the story 'Giraffes Can't Dance' and how we have to have a 'can do attitude' and that we always we to try and not say 'I can't'.

We cannot wait for more adventures next half term!