Nursery (pm)

Welcome to our Afternoon Nursery Page!

Spring Term 1

January 2020 – Happy New Year!

It has been lovely to welcome back all of the children this week after our Christmas break. The children have been very excited to see their friends and talk about the fun activities they have been doing with their families over the half term.

Afternoon Nursery has started the year by focusing our learning around the children’s most recent interest, Frozen 2 with a book focus of 'An Amazing Snowman'. This topic enables opportunities for the children to explore the themes of winter and friendship. Friendship is especially important this term as we will be welcoming some new friends to our Nursery during our January intake of pupils. We are very excited to meet all of our new friends and to complete our fun activities.

We will keep you updated with photographs below to show our learning over the upcoming weeks.

Autumn Term 2

This term our topics include ‘Our Firework Experiences’, ‘We’re going on a bear hunt by Michael Rosen’ and ‘Christmas’. During this term we will continue to explore all seven areas of development with a focus particularly upon the prime areas of development (communication and language, PSED and physical development). This is to ensure that the children are secure in these areas before we move on to the specific areas of development (Literacy, Mathematics, understanding the world and expressive arts and design) after Christmas.

04.11.2019 – Our Firework Experiences

This week we had lots of fun talking about our experiences of the different firework displays that we had seen over the weekend whilst we created our firework paintings and completed our firework activities.

06.11.2019 – We made our own bonfire snack today!

Today we had lots of fun creating a set of instructions on how to make a chocolate apple during a shared writing activity. Then we followed our list of instructions in the correct order to create our chocolate apples to eat at snack time. Our faces got very chocolatey!

11.11.2019 - We’re going on a Bear Hunt!

This week we started our new topic ‘We’re going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen’. After reading the story we decided to go on our very own bear hunt in the outdoor area. We talked about the different settings that the story takes place in and then we visited them in the correct order. We found long wavy grass, water, thick oozy mud, a forest, it was very windy like a snowstorm and finally we found a cave! Throughout the walk we said the repeated refrains from the story, ‘uh-uh! We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it’ at each obstacle we encountered.   

Autumn Term 1

This term our topics include ‘This is Me’, ‘Autumn’ and our book focus will be ‘Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson’ towards the end of the term.

This is me!

During this topic we have been learning all about ourselves with a focus especially upon the prime areas of learning (communication and language, physical development and PSED). Below are a variety of photographs of some of the activities we have enjoyed. 

Our Sensory Walk

During our ‘this is me’ topic we labelled our body parts on a large outline of a body and talked about our senses during a carpet time activity. The children were able to describe what we use each of our senses for. Afterwards we went on a sensory walk in our outdoor area describing what we could see, hear, smell and feel throughout our walk.

07.10.2019 Autumn is here!

This week we introduced the topic 'autumn' by going on different autumn walks in the outdoor area. We had lots of fun during our listening walk, colour walk and our spotting the signs of autumn walk that we went on throughout the week. We noticed that the leaves had changed colour, the grass was squelchy from all the rain, the apple tree was full of ripe apples and it was becoming colder. We also heard the geese honking in the sky whilst travelling south to their warm winter home. 

21.10.2019 – Halloween Activities

This week we explored the seven areas of learning through our book focus, Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. We had a very exciting start to the week; the Witch from the story wrote a letter to Afternoon Nursery explaining that she needed our help. We were delighted that she knew our school address and were able to help the Witch by creating her bubbling potions in the indoor and outdoor area. We had lots of fun but ended up quite smelly, sticky and messy from the ingredients, especially the vinegar!

We then used our knowledge of the story to sequence it and re-enact it in a variety of activities throughout the week. We particularly enjoyed designing and creating our very own flying broom stick in the indoor construction area and with the large construction materials in the outdoor area.

At the end of the week we had our Halloween disco and party food. We liked dancing, singing and playing our party games whilst we were dressed in our scary costumes. A big thank you to all the parents for your help and support, they all looked amazing!

Welcome 

What a fantastic start to the new school year! All the children have settled in so well to their new school routine and are looking so smart in their new ‘big boy’ or ‘big girl’ uniform.

In nursery we are committed to ensuring full coverage of the EYFS Curriculum, as well as acting upon current research into effective Early Years pedagogy when planning purposeful, first-hand experiences and opportunities.

During our afternoon session we enable children to be active, independent learners by providing a safe, stimulating and exciting indoor and outdoor learning environment, in which children are encouraged and supported to develop critical thinking skills in order to achieve their maximum potential.

This page will be used to keep you up to date with photographs of all our fabulous learning that takes place during the afternoon session. I aim to keep this page updated regularly with our current topics and any important information will be added to our notice board in the cloakroom. However, if you have any queries please don’t hesitate to speak to me at the start or the end of each day.

Thank you for your continued support, Mrs Duke and Mrs Davey.

Useful Information

• Snack money is £1.50 per week and to be paid on a Monday morning if possible please. Children receive snack twice a day and any extra money is spent on baking/playdough ingredients and messy play activities.

• Home Time – the Nursery door will be opened at 3.00pm until 3.05pm for children leaving nursery at 3pm (Please note if you pick up your child later than this time you will be charged £2 for the child care cost of the 3pm-3.30pm session). The Nursery door will then close until 3.20pm when it will be opened for children leaving at 3.30pm. This is to enable parents to pick up nursery children from school first before older siblings. We hope this does not cause any inconvenience to our parents but opening and closing the door can be very disruptive to our nursery children who are still learning and it also takes a member of staff away from the children at these times.

• School App – please can all parents ensure that they have downloaded the school app. The school app is a really important school to home communication link as we often send out reminders and important information on this. Information about downloading the app can be found on the ‘parents’ section of the school website or you can search ‘St George’s Catholic’ in the app store. Please make sure that you have push notifications enabled to receive any updates relevant to our class.

• Our lending library and busy bags are available to borrow in our nursery cloakroom. We kindly ask if you can sign the items in and out in the record book. Thank you.

Please take a look at the resources below to support your child’s learning at home.