Nursery JH

Welcome to Nursery!

The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) statutory framework is a government document that all schools and Ofsted-registered early years providers in England must follow. It sets standards for the learning, development and care of your child from birth to 5 years old. The standards ensure your child will learn and develop well and are kept healthy and safe.

What Will My Child Be Learning?

The EYFS framework outlines seven areas of learning and development and educational programmes. There are three prime areas of learning, which are particularly important for your child’s development and future learning:

Communication and Language, Personal Social and Emotional Development and Physical Development.

There are four specific areas of learning, through which the prime areas are strengthened and applied:

Literacy, Maths, Understanding the world and Expressive Arts and Design.

Early years practitioners also use your child’s needs and interests to plan challenging and enjoyable activities and experiences.

How Will My Child Be Learning?

The EYFS framework identifies the essential role of play in your child’s development. Our curriculum provides opportunities for abundant free-flow child-led play, where children can push their own boundaries, develop reasoning skills, make decisions, release stress and work through difficult emotions exercising control which is essential for self-regulation. This is therefore the cornerstone of our curriculum. It is through both child-led play and play guided by an adult that your child will develop confidence and relationships with others. Through play, EYFS practitioners will help your child to extend their vocabulary and develop their communication skills. The EYFS framework identifies three characteristics of effective teaching and learning:

Playing and exploring, Active learning and Creating and thinking critically.

A greater focus on teaching specific skills will occur as your child progresses through their reception year, which will help them to prepare for year one.

Our Nursery year 2024 - 2025

We had a wonderful time inviting our parents in to our playdough workshop. We measured the ingredients to make 'no cook playdough' and 'cloud dough' to take home along with recipes for other types of dough. We had fun getting messy with our grown ups!

This term we have been immersing ourselves into everything Autumn. We have been on an Autumn walk, looking for signs of Autumn. We collected some fallen leaves, berries and pinecones and used them in our craft and numeracy activities. We looked at all of the different vegetables that we brought into school and were able to name lots of the them. After carefully chopping all of the vegetables, we then made soup to welcome our grown-ups into school with. It was delicious and healthy! We sang our Autumn songs for our grown-ups too, ending with our favourite, 'Dingle dangle scarecrow'.

Our Nursery Year 2023-2024

STEM science workshop

Spring into Storytime - Too Many Bubbles

Written by David Gibbs, illustrated by Dan Taylor and published by Simon & Schuster, this story is read by Donna from Newcastle West Library.

We had bubble fun with a science lesson with Mel, from Northumbria University. We listened to the story 'Too many bubbles' and we used liquid and gas for our bubble experiments. The liquid was the bubble mixture and the gas was the air that we blew into the bubbles. We used different shaped bubble wands and watched to see what shapes the bubbles would be and Mel and Caitlyn blew some giant bubbles. Our grown ups came to join us - and so did the rain!

HANDA'S SURPRISE Picture Book Animation

Intended for educational purposes. Copyright belongs to RIC Publications

Mrs Henderson introduced our story of 'Handa's surprise' and we talked about where the story took place. We worked out that it was in a hot climate and found out that it was set in the African country of Kenya.

We made 'mud' houses using clay, straw and twigs, African patterns using different shapes to recreate the pattern examples and we used puppets, masks and real fruit to retell the story.

We had a selection of fruits from the story and used the different paint colours to make observational paintings and we also used tangerines for our subitising activity, emulating the patterns on the dice using the tangerines.

Supertato to the rescue!

We enjoyed listening to lots of different Supertato books, written by Sue Hendra. We made Supertatoes with playdough, using Mr Potato head pieces, crafted Supertatoes with their cape and masks, rescued veggies from a trap with tweezers, weighed the Superveggies in the home corner and made vegetable shopping lists and Supertato speech bubbles.

We had fun being back to school after the Easter holiday and exploring our classroom and all of it's new furniture and resources

We had great fun with Phil from 'Muddy Monsters'. He showed us how to be careful around the fire that he lit, we could feel the heat from a safe distance. We enjoyed lots of other outdoor experiences like using the mud kitchen, hanging and pulling ourselves up on the outdoor gym, painting with mud, swinging in the hammock and digging and exploring in the woodland.

We had an amazing attendance for our playdough workshop. We made no-cook playdough and cloud dough with our grown-ups - getting very messy in the process! We also showed our grown-ups how we do 'Disco dough', which helps to strengthen our hands and fingers, ready for mark-making.

Funny faces for Red nose day

We have been creating activities to support children's understanding the world and physical development, specifically using their senses and exploring nature as the children create images and models to support their understanding of the effects of changing seasons, while they learn new words related to Spring.

We shared the story, 'Jasper's beanstalk' and we talked about how plants grow and what we might find at the top of the beanstalk. We planted our own beans and we cannot wait to see how they grow!

Bean Time-Lapse - 25 days | Soil cross section

Kidney bean time lapse with soil cross section. Showing how roots ant upper part of plant grows. Play speed - 17280x (one shot every 9 minutes 36 seconds played at 30 FPS). This was fourth attempt. During other attempts roots grew hidden, further from the glass.

We painted pictures of daffodils and primulas. We looked closely at the colours of the petals and the shapes of the leaves.

We made spring gardens.

We made trees that were starting to grow new leaves and blossom. We used real leaves and flowers and talked about how they feel smell and look like

We used daisies and green playdough to copy subitising patterns.

We enjoyed celebrating Chinese new year - the year of the dragon! We did our own Chinese writing, made Chinese lanterns, money wallets and Chinese cherry blossom. We also celebrated by playing instruments, dancing in the hall and doing a parade through school.

Bertie Owl helped us to talk about celebrating the New Year. We wore party hats and had party blowers. We talked about how we had all celebrated the arrival of the new year and that last year it was 2023 and this year is now 2024.

We did the countdown together and blew the party blowers and wished each other a Happy New Year!

We then had our own New Year tea party and made new year's resolutions

New Year Countdown - 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 - Happy New Year!

Nursery Rhyme Week

Nursery rhymes are important in early years to help children to develop key developmental skills.

They are a powerful learning source in early literacy and enable children to become interested in rhythm and patterns of language.

Rhymes support language and communication skills, build confidence and prepare children for reading and writing as they get older.

We had lots of different rhyme activities this week - we made salt dough currant buns; planted flowers like 'Mary Mary, quite contrary' ; used the farm animals to sing 'Old Macdonald had a farm', using the Makaton signs for the animals and counted the 'speckled frogs' - we even found a speckled frog in our yard!

We went to play outside in our yard and found poor Humpty Dumpty cracked open on the floor next to a wall. Did he fall, or was he pushed?! This was a crime scene! We dusted for fingerprints and looked for footprints with Mrs Weightman and then discovered a clue...

We did lots of Humpty Dumpty themed activities. We built sturdy, strong walls for him to sit on, made salt a dough Humpty Dumpty and did a scientific experiment to find out which material would protect and egg most effectively.

To finish our nursery rhyme week, we invited parents into school to make puppets and resources to support our singing of the rhymes.

To start off anti-bullying week, we took part in odd sock day, highlighting our uniqueness - we are all different, all special!

We have been celebrating Diwali in lots of creative ways in nursery. We made firework pictures, made Mehndi designs, diva lamps and rangoli patterns. Diwali is the Hindu festival of light and symbolises the victory of light over darkness, good over evil and knowledge over ignorance.

We lit our Diva lamps, looking at the lights, shining in our dark classroom.

Our Nursery year 2022-2023

Eco Beaver

We had our annual visit from Mrs Beaver and she took us on a climb up Wish tree mountain, we wrote our wishes on a star and hung them on the wishing tree.
We danced with our silk scarves to waft the wishes into the sky.
We then made a beaver colony, played 5 little speckled frogs, decorated biscuits, dressed up and made lemonade!

We enjoyed having our grown-ups in school for our nursery rhyme workshop. We learned about the importance of nursery rhymes for our language skills and made lots of props to help us to sing our rhymes.

We also shared some yummy hot cross buns