Category: Nursery

🌈 Wow! Wasn’t the summer concert amazing!

Did you enjoy watching the summer concert? Wasn’t it fantastic. Did you see your brothers or sisters performing, or any of your friends? 

I wonder whether you had a favourite song or did you love all of them?

Would you like to draw a picture of the summer concert? You could draw some of the children in costumes, or some of the teachers singing. It would be lovely to see your drawings

🌈 Thinking back…

We know it’s been a very strange year at nursery and we’ve missed out on so much fun and learning together, but we wonder if you can remember some of your favourite times in nursery.

It might be that you liked climbing the trees, or learning new songs, or hunting for the golden pumpkin, or playing hide and seek, or some of the cookery we’ve done together, or drawing and making, or painting, or or or……

Maybe you could draw a picture of your favourite activity or event or perhaps you could draw a picture of your favourite story that we read.  

Here’s some reminders of some of the stories that we read…

Or maybe you enjoyed our educational visits and visitors. Remember when we went on a tour of the school, or when the owls came into nursery, or our snowy trip to Besson Street Community Garden Brrrrr!!!

And then there was our memorable events, the Gingerbread Tea Party, the bedtime stories and the Dragon Parade.

Or maybe you enjoyed just coming to nursery every day, and being able to play in the home corner, or with the play dough, or in the mud kitchen.

If you draw a picture, you could save it and give it to your new teacher so that they know what you like doing too…

🌈 Looking after bees 🐝

Did you plant your seeds for bees? How are they growing. Mine are nearly ready to flower.

Do you know why bees are important?

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2018/07/why-are-bees-important-and-how-you-can-help-them/

Sometimes bees need a helping hand, when they’ve run out of energy. If you notice a bee that’s struggling you can make them a sugary nectar. This bee landed in my garden and here it is drinking the sugary nectar. We couldn’t believe how clearly you can see it drinking.

This website has interesting information about bees. https://www.natgeokids.com/uk/discover/animals/insects/honey-bees/

I’m going to go on a walk around my neighbourhood and see if I can find plants that bees like.

I heard lots of buzzing in this plant. When you go outside today can you have a look for any bees. You will see that there are many different types of bees.

You could use these pictures to help identify different types of bees

Ps…. I’ve just heard that today is the start of The Big Butterfly Count. Here’s the link to the website. You have to count and identify the butterflies that you see in 15 minutes. There’s an app or a sheet to download. https://bigbutterflycount.butterfly-conservation.org/

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🌈 Saying goodbye to the butterflies

I took our butterflies into school today to show them to the children in the reception bubble and to set them free in the Edmund Waller playground.

We waved the butterflies off and wished them good luck. Luckily they were all really good at flying.

We all hoped that the butterflies would land on our hands, but they flew in a circle and then took off into the trees.

We hoped that the butterflies will stay in the playground and lay their eggs there so that we can see lots of painted lady butterflies when you’re in reception next year.

Can you remember the different stages in the butterfly life cycle?

Can you draw them? Here’s an example…..

Egg Caterpillar. Chrysalids. Butterfly. Egg.

On the 30th July the wonderful butterfly house at the Horniman reopens. Here’s the link in case you’d like to go….

https://www.horniman.ac.uk/event/butterfly-house/

🌈 Butterfly printing

This is always a great response to the butterflies and children really enjoy the process and get so much from doing it.

They are able to explore symmetry and colour mixing.

They are also able to strengthen their hand muscles as they use the syringe.

You will need some poster paint, a syringe, and some paper. I like to use tracing paper so that children can see the paint colours mixing and they can manipulate the paint with more control.

Start by folding the paper in half.

Choose two or three colours and load each colour into the syringe.

Now squeeze out the paint onto the folded piece of paper one colour at a time.

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Now fold the paper back over and use your finger to manipulate the paint, moving it and mixing it through the paper. When you’re happy with the effect, open up the paper and look at your butterfly print.

🌈 3 little butterflies

Well, after much waiting the butterflies have almost all hatched out of their chrysalids.

Our butterflies have really enjoyed the sunshine today. They’ve been feeding on the buddleia and drinking nectar. Sadly one of our butterflies had a damaged wing.

I took a picture so that you can see her closely. Maybe you could have a go at drawing a picture of her.

We are still waiting for one butterfly to hatch….. I wonder when it will start. I’ve been checking it all day and it’s chrysalid has turned quite dark….once the last butterfly hatched I will have to release them in a couple of weeks they can go and lay their eggs.

Last year there were hundreds of painted lady butterflies spotted in Scotland. This link gives information about them….

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-49210010

This is a life cycle film and you can see the caterpillar metamorphosis in good detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQOFh1exp3A

🌈 Butterfly update

Well it’s been a whole week since the chrysalids formed, and yesterday was a very exciting day as 2 of our butterflies have hatched. Can you work out how many are still chrysalids? Remember there were 5 caterpillars at the beginning.

I’ve given them some flowers, and apples and I made a sugary nectar solution for the butterflies to feed on. The flowers are called buddleia and you will see purple buddleia growing everywhere at this time of year. Buddleia is also known as butterfly bush!

Now I’ve got to wait patiently for the other butterflies to hatch. I read that the chrysalids go dark before the butterflies hatch out. I wonder which one will hatch first.

🌈 Time for some counting

Have you got some Lego or duplo at home. If so you could try this maths sorting and counting activity.

When we talk about one to one correspondence we are thinking about children using one number name for each object counted. It’s so beneficial for children to count by touching each object when they are counting large groups. Children are also taught to count things that can’t be seen or moved, like jumps or claps.

We often sing this song at nursery as it encourages children to clap a specific number of times.

First you might like to do some sorting. I’ve sorted by size of piece. Can you think of another way to sort your pieces? Now you can start to make some towers.

This activity will help children to visualise quantity and compare amounts.

If you sort them by size and colour you can compare quantities.

Now you can order and group them by their quantity. Which one is there the most of? Which one is there the least of? Are there any that are the same quantity?

Next can you order them from the most to the least.

When the towers are arranged like so children will find it much easier to make comparisons.

How about separating them into colour groups and then estimating which will have the most. After that you could stack them up and see which tower is the tallest.

You could do some calculations.

Take ten pieces that are three different colours. Then sort and stack them together.

4 and 4 and 2 makes 10

🌈 Getting ready for Reception

One of the lovely things about teaching EYFS children is how much we get to know them and to know about them.

With this in mind I thought it might be useful for our nursery children who are moving on to reception to prepare a drawing about themselves to help their new teacher to find out about them.

It’s worth thinking about what they enjoy most at school. What they enjoy most about home, who are the important people in their lives and what they are most looking forward to about reception.

If we were at nursery, we would have spent a good deal of time talking about reception.

Now that the children have found out which class they will be in it’s worth remembering that Reception has free flow play meaning that the children can play together, inside their own classes, outside and in the other class. It’s very sociable and there’s lots of opportunities to make new friends.

Here’s an idea for your all about me booklet. I’m going to fold a piece of paper into 4 squares like this. You might want to give your child one piece of paper to do each drawing on or you might want to scribe some of their ideas.

The reception teachers say that they’d love to see your drawings. You could pop them into the office or send to homelearning.

Here’s some pictures of our two reception classes at Edmund Waller and the garden too.