Our Chinese Dancing

Happy Chinese New Year

The children had a great week celebrating Chinese New Year. We planned lots of activities for the children to explore. Here is one of our Elmers exploring noodles and using chop sticks. The children were better at this than the grown ups.

We talked about the animals in the Chinese calendar and watched a video that told us the story of The Chinese New Year.

This year is the year of the pig. Here is another Elmer making a collage of a pig using pink tissue paper and adding on features.

To finish off a lovely week, the children were lucky enough to take part in some Chinese Dancing. The children did a great job and really enjoyed it. 

Snow, Snow, Snow

In Elmer's we love to explore. This week we have explored different homemade snow. We made our snow from shaving foam and bicarb. We even put it in the fridge to make it feel cold like real snow. We played with it and used some fantastic words to describe how it feels, smells and looks. We even had a snow lab where we were able to use lots of different ingredients to try and make the best snow.

We have also been developing our fine motor skills this week by threading our own mittens with Mrs Laver. This is really helping to strengthen our fingers for writing.

We would  like to remind our parents about our class lending library.

In Elmers we are lucky to have an abundance of great children's books. We read these books as a class and also sometimes when we want so quiet time in our reading area. Often our children ask if they can take the books home to share with parents. The answer is YES.

If a child would like to take a book to share at home, please fill in the details - Name, Date, Title on the lending library clipboard which can be found in the Purple tray. We don't have a set length of time for borrowing but do ask that you can be considerate of the fact that someone else might enjoy the same book.

Thank you for your continued support.

Settling In

Since starting back after the Christmas holidays, we have had lots of new Elmers join us. It's always great to meet new friends and so pleasing to see how the 'old' Elmers have grown up. There are such kind children in our class who have spent the time playing, talking and helping out our newest Elmers. It really has been a delight to watch. Thank you everyone. 

If you get the chance, please pop into Elmers and have a look at the fantastic work we have been creating based around our topic. We have already filled two displays with our cotton wool snowmen, polar bears and igloos. We have been practicing our cutting skills to cut out winter pictures and talking about which are bigger and which are smaller. 

Our focus book this week has been the Gruffalo's Child and the children have enjoyed predicting which animals have made the tracks in the snow. They have also been using animals in the classroom to make tracks of their own by printing with the animals feet and white paint. 

We have also had a big focus on mark making over the past couple of weeks. In Elmers we mark make everywhere and with everything. Here are some of our children tracing cold words and drawing lines in our sandy snow. 

Welcome Back!

The children have settle back into nursery after a lovely Christmas holiday. They have been excited to share their holiday experiences in circle time and have listened well to each other. Thank you from all the staff and children in Elmers for your help, support and generosity over the Christmas period it was very much appreciated by all.

Forest School

So now we're back and have hit the ground running with our second visit to Forest School. The children were very well prepared - thank you. 

We looked at how our forest school has changed since we were last in it. We were sad to see that all the fruit had gone but pleased that there were plenty of bear sticks for us to make our forest paint brushes. We used these for practicing our mark making it was great fun.  

Both Mr Butler and Mrs Bracken made us a fire so that we could toast our Marshmallows. It was tricky to hold the stick over the fire and not let the Marshmallows fall in.