Newsletter November 2021

It has been a busy month with lots of great activities and celebrations taking place including, Remembrance Day, Diwali and Pyjama Day for Children In Need. Thank you to all the families for all your support and donations for all the wonderful charities we have supported.

The children had great fun coming into nursery in their pyjamas for the day. They also participated in a range of yellow themed activities, made cakes to share with their families and had a teddy bears picnic with their teddies from home. While celebrating Diwali the children created their own Diva lamps, rangoli patterns and learnt all about the cultural celebrations. For Remembrance Day there was some beautiful poppy artwork created and the children heard everything about the very brave people during the war and those that were not as fortunate to come home.

As the nights are getting colder and darker the children have been exploring and learning all about the animals’ habitats and how they hibernate for the colder days. They even made Ned the hedgehog using clay and natural resources from around the garden.

Babies have been exploring the story ‘Gruffalo’, which they have thoroughly enjoyed. Each week they have looked at a different character from the book. They created pictures using a variety of mark making resources such as painting the owl, tissue paper mice and green themed snakes. Fun has been had with loads of messy play including owl ice cream, roasted fox carrot play, and finding animals in the shredded paper. This has also been linked into the garden going on nature hunts for the animals.

The children have also learnt lots of new nursery rhymes and carried out many activities with these themes, such as boats in jelly, linking into the song Row, Row, Row your boat.

Toddlers have been engrossed in a variety of sensory and messy play experiences. These have included mark making with a variety of mediums such as, playdough, finger art, paint, pencils and chalks to create different marks on paper, card and other materials. The children have enjoyed watching their marks become present with associations being made between their movements and the marks being made as a result of these. They have also incorporated their theme of ‘The Gruffalo’ in some activities getting messy with scrambled snake spaghetti, finding snakes using different utensils, emptying, and filling containers as they look through the Gruffalo crumble and using shaving foam and cups for owl ice cream.

Our Forest school sessions have been looking at the ever-changing environment and using the leaves to make collage pictures.

Our Pre-school children having been learning all about safety, especially with fireworks night. They particularly enjoyed recreating their own ‘fire’ in the garden areas and inside the castle before being faced with the challenge of finding a way to put it out. The children have been supported to understand the dangers of fire and safety precautions which must be taken with Guy Fawkes and fireworks.

They have also learnt about Road Safety Week and created their own traffic lights painting egg cartons and making a zebra crossing to use in the garden as they discussed the safety of crossing the road. They have also been using the bikes out in the garden with our road signs, discussing what each sign means.

Pre-school have also had lots of educational fun looking at their project of healthy and unhealthy foods. This included looking at a variety of food bought from the supermarket, discussing those that were healthy and unhealthy. They cut up their own snacks and explored the tastes and textures of the fruit and vegetables. Then they even used some to paint with and see the different marks they made. Our pre-schoolers have also explored a variety of colours looking at the different effects these make when mixing them together. They used milk and poured food colouring into his to see the different patterns and used lots of descriptive words about what they could see and was happening.