We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Merry New Year!

The children had a great time at our class Christmas party.

Playing pass the parcel and musical statues.

 

And of course our lovely party food.

 

 

 

 

 

Our Christmas performance - Christmas Around the World.

 

Thank you for all our Christmas cards, greetings and presents!

Have a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year.

Dear Santa...

It's so exciting.. Christmas is nearly here!!

Early Years sang, danced and rocked out in their Christmas performance and we are really proud of them. Due to the snow day, they didn't have a chance for a dress rehearsal and even though they are so young, they were very brave and performed their best in front of such a large audience - well done to all of your children and to you for showing your support!  Please watch this space for photos of the performance.

Our role play is now Santa's wrapping station. We can send and make cards, dress up like Santa and dress our Christmas tree.

 

Our text this week is Dear Santa by Rod Campbell

We made up our own version of the story by unwrapping different presents and talking about why each one wasn't quite right.

Blowing out the Christmas candle in the Christmas assembly.

 

Decorating biscuits to help us with our fine motor skills - they were very yummy to eat too!

 

 Christmas jumper day!

Lunch club have lots of fun joining the whole school for a special lunch. We enjoyed pulling our crackers but our hats may have been a little too big...

 

 

 We had great fun in the snow.

 

 

Please remember the last day of term is Tuesday 19th December.

We will be having a Christmas party next week and a letter will come out tomorrow with more details (Thursday 14th).

Nativity

This week we have been reading the Nativity story.

We have retold the Nativity story using small world figures.

We have been learning that Christians believe that baby Jesus was born at Christmas.

We have been busy learning our Christmas songs for our performance on Tuesday. We hope you'll come and see us.

We made baubles for our Class Christmas tree using characters from the Nativity story to help us remember what happened and who was there.

We have also been thinking about cold and arctic weather. We used the penguins and polar bears in the 'snow' and thought about how it feels and what it would be like to live somewhere freezing cold.

We have been making snowflakes to decorate our classroom for the school fair on Saturday. We practised our cutting skills to make our snowflakes.

We have practised our fine motor skills by making Christmas stars and decorating them in different ways.

We looked at patterns this week, using movements, colours and voices. We thought patterns were a bit like taking turns - first one then the other.

At home you could try making patterns of your own with colours, sounds or movements.

Next week we will be continuing our Christmas theme by thinking about Santa Claus and using this as a focus for our learning.

We will be having a class party on the morning of Monday 18th December. There will be a letter coming home to confirm details about this.

A Sticky Situation!

This week our text has been Stick Man by Julia Donaldson (author of The Gruffalo).

We went on a treasure hunt to find the perfect stick. We used our sticks to make our own stick men in the making area and in the play dough area. We used our stick men to retell the story.

 

 

We read a book by Antoinette Portis called Not a Stick.

We used our imaginations to think about what our sticks could be and the children came up with lots of great ideas. Then we used felt tips to incorporate our sticks into pictures.

In maths we have been singing counting, adding and taking away songs with props.

We made our own adding machine find out how many pom pom balls we would have altogether if we dropped some down one chute and our friend dropped some down another. We recorded our maths.

 

 We have been making temporary art inside natural picture frames and the children have been learning how to take photos themselves on the ipad, This has encouraged the children to make and take some wonderful pictures.

 

 

 We have been learning about making observational drawings and paying attention to fine details. We have been concentrating on using the correct pincer grip on our pens and add as much detail as we can.

 

 

 

A few photos form the end of last week - our handmade shakers to add rhythms to our favourite rhymes...

and photos from our retelling our own version of Peace at Last to Year 1, with sound effects!

For the next few weeks we will be focusing on Christmas - the Christmas story and how Christmas is celebrated. We will use our theme to teach all areas of learning.

We have a phonics workshop for all parents/carers on Wednesday 6th December at 9am. We would love for you to pop along so that we can share with you how we are teaching your children phonic skills.

Also to remind you that we have our Christmas Performance on Tuesday December 12th. We look forward to seeing you there. We would really appreciate it if Nursery children could bring white or yellow clothing in a named carrier bag by Friday 8th December so that we can make sure all our children are dressed for the part!

Many thanks

Peace at Last!

Peace at Last

Following our work on Owl Babies, we made our owl babies a safe and cosy owl house. We decided to add a roof to keep our owl babies dry in the rain.

Our book this week is Peace At Last ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnTVo_TDWBE)

We have had great fun making the sounds in the story and adding our own noises to the story too.

While we were thinking about sounds, we investigated materials that would make the best shakers. We decided that cotton wool was too soft and we couldn't hear it. We thought rice, lentils and pasta were the best shaker materials. We used our shakers to accompany ourselves sing rhymes and songs.

We have explored number in lots of different ways.

We threw bean bags into a hoop and counted how many landed inside the hoop and how many landed outside. We recorded what we found.

We used the play dough to sing the currant bun song. We counted how many were left each time.

We thought about the different ways of splitting our cakes but that it always made 5.

Outside the children have been using the large blocks to make some amazing constructions including this fabulous car with " a boot, a bonnet and a horn".

We have been using our fine motor skills to thread, stick and mark make. Here we made our names using stickers.

Next week we will be reading Stick Man by Julia Donaldson, and exploring using sticks for a variety of purposes including creating art work, counting and mark making.

If you would like to play games at home to help your child's learning you could try reading rhyming stories and helping your child to change the words to popular nursery rhymes :

Humpty Dumpty sat on a hat

Humpty dumpty had a great....

How could you finish this rhyme?

You could also find nonsense rhyming words for your family members and help your child make rhyming strings ...daddy, paddy, waddy  etc.

Rhyming helps your child to play with sounds and words and think about initial phonic sounds which will help them when they are ready to write.

Have fun!