Chaucer Community Primary School

Nursery Blog – Autumn 2 – 2023-2024

Week 8 – Hanukkah

What a lovely last week of term we have had! The children loved finishing their Christmas celebrations – we even got to meet Father Christmas who gave us all a gift. We have enjoyed learning all about Hanukkah. In our Magic Drawing session this week we enjoyed following the instructions to create a Menorah and a Dreidel! We have also enjoyed building our gross motor skills outside! Well Done Little Puffins!

Week 7 – The Jolly Christmas Postman

This week we have enjoyed exploring the text – The Jolly Christmas Postman. The children have enjoyed building narrative with the small world scenes surrounding the text and even added it to the “snow” in the messy play area to make it more like the story. We have enjoyed consolidating our learning about the Tree by creating a season calendar adding the different colours to match the seasons. We created our own elf on the shelf developing our scissor skills. Mrs Gough hurt her leg this week so we used our critical thinking skills to decide what we could use in our classroom to make it better and even developed our mark making skills by writing a bump note. This week we also enjoyed our performing our nativity – see dojo and we tried our Christmas lunch – we loved using a knife and fork and trying the different vegetables.  

Week 6 – Dear Santa

The Little Puffins have had another busy week – this time exploring the Christmas celebrations. We have enjoyed listening to the text “Dear Santa” and talking about the different words to describe the presents Santa brought. We then created our own page again. We have enjoyed learning outside this week – drawing with the chalk, replanting our acorns from the farm, developing our fundamental skills and experimenting with different equipment in the sand to see which lets the sand out quickest. Inside the children have enjoyed following step by step instructions to draw Santa, decorating the tree together and designing and building a hat for Rosie (Rosie’s Hat text) to see if it will blow away in the wind or not. 

Week 5 – Tap the Magic Tree

This week the children have enjoyed exploring the text “Tap the Magic Tree” We enjoyed taking part with the different actions in the text and later in the week we created our own page with different actions. We have had a very busy week with different events – visiting the post-box to send our Christmas letters, the pantomime, elf run, Elmer crafts and continuing our celebration and learning about Chaucer 120 (See the school blog for more details on these). Back in the classroom we have enjoyed looking at animals that hibernate in the autumn and created our own hedgehogs using clay and built them houses in the construction area. 

Week 4 – Tree

This week we have enjoyed exploring the text “Tree”, the children have enjoyed painting trees thinking about the colours based on the season. We have used our critical thinking to make a tree using Lego in the construction area. We have also looked at the artists Andy Goldsworthy and Jackson Pollock – we used paint to splash to recreate Pollocks splatter paintings. Some of the children enjoyed looking at Andy Goldsworthy’s autumn themed art and recreated the patterns using the autumn coloured leaves. We have loved using the natural materials to create patterns. Outside we have enjoyed building our own obstacle courses and we took part in a bike ride for Chaucer 120. 

Week 3 – Remembrance Day

This week the children have been learning all about Remembrance Day. We enjoyed exploring the text “Where the Poppies now grow” looking at the lives of Ben and Ray. The children painted and created our own wreath and later in the week we walked to the park to lay it at the cenotaph. When we returned the children enjoyed making a replica of the cenotaph in the construction area. The children loved learning about the medals Ben and Ray wore at the end of the text. We then had the opportunity to look at Mrs Gough’s grandads army medals, we were very excited to go and create our own medals after this in the mark making area. Outside this week we have enjoyed mark making again with the chalk creating our own poppies. In maths this week we have enjoyed learning about the number 2 and we created a number 2 shop where we bought 2 things that were on our number 2 shopping list. 

Week 2 – Diwali

This week we have looked at Diwali in nursery. The children have loved learning about the festival of light. We have enjoyed using clay to make our own Diya lamps. We have created Rangoli patterns using art materials and loose parts. We later used the loose parts to create fireworks to celebrate the festival and used the chalk outside to mark make the firework patterns then used our imagination to become fireworks making the different firework sounds. We have enjoyed our forest school session – we created fireworks and Rangoli patterns using the natural materials – we even noticed a pattern on the floor. The children have enjoyed learning all about India – we found the Taj Mahal on our globe and “flew” on google maps to India – we then enjoyed dancing the the Bollywood music. We have enjoyed learning about healthy foods in our food session, learning the difference between a fruit and a vegetable. We then used our senses to explore the food. It has been an incredibly busy week again. Well done Little Puffins!

Week 1 – Halloween 

Nursery have had an incredible week exploring Halloween – we have developed our fine motor skills and used tweezers to collect Halloween pasta from the spiders web then created repeating patterns using it. We loved our visit to Cobble Hey Farm & Gardens to collect pumpkins, plant our own acorns into recycled pots that we made ourselves using newspaper and explore the farm. We then returned to nursery and made our own soup using the pumpkins and loved trying it. Later we created our own maps of the journey the pumpkin made from the farm to our table. We have enjoyed exploring the pumpkins with using our 5 senses and then painting some of the pumpkins and making our own pumpkin biscuits. We have had a fantastic week. In maths we have enjoyed exploring the number 1 – creating number 1 flapjacks using 1 scoop of each ingredient, making number 1 scenes with the playdough and going on a number 1 hunt around our classroom. We have developed our vocabulary talking about what a pumpkin is like. Well done Little Puffins!