This term, we’ve been busy exploring castles and fairy tales! We kicked things off with a deep dive into castles, building our own with turrets, crenellations, and pretend candles! The children learned about life without electricity, discovering how people used to wash clothes the old-fashioned way—by scrubbing the King's smelly socks!
Next, we journeyed into the world of traditional fairy tales to look for castles, starting with Jack and the Beanstalk. The kids loved shouting "Fee Fi Fo Fum," pretending to sneak through castles on tin can stilts, and decorating their own magic beans. In maths, we counted tons of magic beans!
The fun continued with The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The children built bridges, trip-trapped over them and had a blast acting out the story. Forest school saw the biggest bridge of all!
Week 4 was Cooking Week, where we baked and decorated gingerbread men! The children loved the story and came up with clever solutions to share the gingerbread man role in our chase games. We even had a gingerbread shop for some maths fun!
We celebrated Chinese New Year by making stick puppets of snakes and pretending to race across rivers like the animals in the Jade Emperor’s race. Messy play with red and black rice was a hit!
For our final week, we took on The Three Little Pigs, building dens and huffing and puffing like the wolf! The children even used shaving foam to stick bricks together—talk about piggy fun in the mud!
Our musical adventures included exploring medieval harp music and strumming ukuleles, while our shape-focus fun included a wacky "cookie" game, where shapes kept changing!
It’s been a magical term of learning, play and imagination!
This Term Acorns Nursery children have been exploring the topic ‘Lets Celebrate!’ We have looked at a variety of different celebrations including Halloween, Bonfire night, Diwala, Christmas and Hanukkah, we’ve talked about who might celebrate them and very importantly, how. The children have noticed a common theme for how these events are celebrated - fireworks, candles and treat foods. In Health and Fitness Week the children enjoyed taking part in all the physical activity, we talked about how to keep ourselves healthy including exploring healthy and ‘treat’ food and linked this to our celebrations. The children enjoyed making a sensory Christmas pudding playdough and loved making Latkes especially as they could eat them.
We have explored the signs of Winter and we’re very certain some small people are very keen to experience snow. We have had lots of pretend Winter scenes out on our tuff spots. Including foamy sea-creatures and the North pole.
The children have enjoyed playing with babies in the home corner and laterly making their own Christmas cards, making marks, sealing them in envelopes and sticking on stamps before popping them in the post box they helped paint red.
We’ve had ‘Acorns Post Service’ run by the children for cards they have brought from home and they have taken turns to empty our post box, stamp the envelopes and post them into their friends drawers.
We explored the Nativity story which saw Brenda and Nettie act out the story of the birth of Jesus with our knitted Nativity. We also explored the different ways Christmas might be celebrated and for some families- it’s about having fun together in lots of different ways and for others they celebrate baby Jesus’ birthday.
On December the 4th the children performed their Winter show, with their retelling of Stickman. We had lots of stickmen and dogs on stage playing their part and we were very proud of their performance. After the show the children enjoyed an activity morning with their special adults.
We’ve used lots of tools for Forest School, experimented with hammering, drilled holes in conkers and the children have sawn sticks to make their very own Stickman decorations.
In music we have been exploring lots of Christmas songs as well as the ones for the Winter show. They enjoyed hearing Christmas songs being played on two different recorders and some of the children were able to distinguish between high & low sounds. Most of them were delighted to have a go on the school recorders and some that were interested managed to play the first two bars of Jingle bells after learning the note B, replicating the rhythm..
Our final week involved finishing Christmas cards and decorations and Christmas party fun including pinning the nose on the Snowman, pass-the-parcel and decorating a biscuit to look like a Christmas tree.
In Acorns Nursery this term we have enjoyed getting to know new faces and have started with the year exploring the topic ‘All About Me’, exploring our body part names and our senses, our likes and dislikes. Interlaced with this we explored the changes of the Seasons and Harvest time and finished with how people might celebrate Halloween.
For maths we looked at the concept ‘big and small’ by comparing feet and hand sizes. We compared piles of conkers to discuss who has more or fewer. Everyone wanted more conkers! We counted conkers and compared quantities to numbers. We played a Hedgehog game and counted the spikes and tried to guess the number of dots on the dice. We measured ourselves and looked at the concept of ‘tall & short’.
We got creative painting portraits of ourselves, made pictures with leaves, used pine cones to make hedgehogs. We made more leaves for our ‘Book Nook Tree’ to reflect the changes of the season.
We have had lots of funky finger activities that include, chopping apples, using tweezers and scissors, mark making with dry wipe pens to decorate our grown ups faces or to give animals stripes or spots. We moulded play dough of a variety of colours and scents and enjoyed dough discos. We mixed and poured rice, pasta and conkers. We played with sand and water.
We got up close and personal with food, exploring how Bread was made with the ‘Little Red Hen’. We ground corn into flour and baked flatbreads. We looked at vegetables that can be harvested in the UK and looked at Harvest time in another part of the world and tasted fruits from the story ‘Handa’s Surprise’. We chopped up apples and made and tasted apple juice.
During Forest School we have had a wonderful time exploring the forest in all weathers. Some weeks we’ve had lots of rain and mud, other days glorious sunshine and the children have embraced it all. We’ve made faces using natural materials and dough, wands using sticks, wool and leaves, made magic potions and found so many points of interest. The tyre swing has been a particular favourite.
All the children participated in ‘Show and Tell’ introducing their favourite topic, their family!
All the children have been exploring how we show we are listening and use the visual guide of our listening beanstalk to think about our body language to show we are listening.
Everyday we sing nursery rhymes, we’ve been playing listening games and have tried to match the instrument to the sound, we’ve enjoyed playing with musical instruments but also listening to music from different genres. We’ve played some of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the children have explored moving to the tempo, working out if it’s fast or slow and working out whether it makes the music seem happy or sad. For Black History month we explored different genres of music by black musicians and moved to the music… exploring similar Themes. The Black history month has linked to our topic ‘All about me’ and how we are all different, how we like doing different things, are good at different things, have different hair, eye or skin colour and talk about how being different makes us special.
Physical development has involved lots of going on the bikes, being in the garden and climbing over equipment. The children have been practising their balancing by building bridges and walking over them and we’ve used the apparatus in the school hall for PE sessions. We have also been practising our catching and throwing with a witchy theme, pretending to throw ingredients (bean bags) into a cauldron.
Our last week at school saw us observing the changes when we mixed bicarbonate of soda and vinegar together and describing what happens.
We have read a variety of different books in line with our topics but also regularly choose library books to take home to share at home.
Longvernal Forest Nursery enjoys full access to the school's two Forest areas. We are lucky enough to have our own Level 3 qualified Forest School practitioner. Come and visit us to explore our purpose-built indoor spaces plus our extensive grounds, 50 tonne sandpit and talk to the team about our play-based Early Years curriculum.