Grange Valley Primary & Nursery School

Welcome to Nursery 2019-20

Please check our Nursery blog regularly for updates and important dates for your diary.

At Grange Valley Primary School, we value the importance of child led learning. Planning 'in the moment' is all about seizing the moment for children to progress in their learning, whilst following their own interests. Based on what the children are already deeply involved in, this way of planning relies on our skilled practitioners, to use quality interactions to draw out the children’s knowledge and build on it there and then. We observe the children in their play and look out for ‘teachable moments’ which we then act upon in order to ensure the children progress.

This way of working means that most planning is retrospective. Each member of the Early Years team records what they have done each day to help the children with their learning. We then look at this at the end of the day to consider how we can further develop and extend this learning.

Each half-term we will publish an overview of what we have been doing in nursery and photographs of the children learning.

We look forward to taking the children on a wonderful learning journey and to working with lots of new children and families.

Autumn Term

Our children have all settled in well and made lots of new friends. The children are now familiar with our nursery routines and enjoy taking part in adult-led sessions with their key group teacher and friends. The children’s confidence and independence is growing and they’re now able to serve themselves at the snack bar.

During our first few weeks in nursery we spent time getting to know the children. We talked about our families, our interests, our favourite things and our likes and dislikes. In September the sun was still shining and we enjoyed spending time outside on our playground and in our forest area. One day we saw a frog happily hopping on the grass, we used magnifying glasses to take a closer look and then moved him safely to our pond. Then the leaves changed colour and started to fall off the trees. We went on an autumn walk to collect all the wonderful things that had fallen off trees, we collected hundreds of conkers!

Our children love to read! Our Reading Garden is always busy with children choosing stories to share with their teachers and friends. One of our children’s favourite stories this half term has been ‘The Three Little Pigs’. The children enjoyed helping retell the story using their Big Bad Wolf voice. We went on a local walk to look at the houses around our school and back in nursery we dressed up as builders and pretended to build our own houses.

On the build up to our Pumpkin party the children enjoyed reading ‘Room on the Broom’. We played a game where we had to remember all of the animals in the story who helped the witch, it was very tricky. We made up rhyming spells to turn people into frogs and mixed up magic potions. We talked about spooky stuff and other things they might be frightened of, Miss Prescott is frightened of spiders. We made spider decorations with 8 legs. Our pumpkin party was lots of fun and we enjoyed dancing, watching a magic show and playing party games.

After a local walk to Tesco’s to pick up a pumpkin our children were interested in transport and the different types of transport they saw whilst out and about. Following this we went on imaginary train journeys on a magic train and role-played working at the ticket station choo choo. We constructed a boat and a ship outdoors using boxes and we drew maps to follow.

We had a colourful time as we explored bonfire night. We made junk model rockets and explored making firework sounds using different instruments. In our hall time the children enjoyed zooming around like different types of fireworks. Some of our children made beautiful firework pictures by exploring colour mixing.

During the Autumn term the new Toy Story film came out. Lots of our children went to see the film and enjoyed talk about it. The bad guy Zurg from the film came to our nursery and tied up some of our toy. The children made traps to catch him and wrote him letters to stay away. Each child brought in their favourite toy from home and showed their friends what it did at group time.

Once the weather started to get cold some of our children got the snuffles, the children pretended to be doctors and nurses. We set up a hospital role-play area and it was fantastic to see the children taking on different roles and engaging so well with their peers. The children learnt about their bodies and how they can keep themselves healthy.

As Christmas approached we had a little visitor in our nursery who played tricks on us, his name was Buddy the elf. The children had lots of fun looking for him each morning. He gave the children daily challenges and the children wrote him lots of writing. We did lots Christmas craft including cards, calendars, tree decorations and wreaths. We had a fantastic time on our trip to Imagine That!, the children explored science experiments, a range of role-play experiences, made Christmas craft and met Santa. To complete our Christmas festivities the children performed a Christmas sing-along for their parents, they sang beautifully on the big stage in the hall.

We can’t wait to see what the Spring term brings!

When we started back after Christmas we had lots of new children starting out nursery. We spent the first few weeks getting to know the new children and helping them understand how our nursery works. They settled in beautifully and we quickly started our first theme.

The weather was very cold and outside our playground was white and icy. We used a range of information books to find out about the season Winter and learnt about all the changes that happen outside. We wrapped up warm and went out for a winter walk on the field. The children enjoyed making tracks in the frost covered grass and listening to the crunchy sound of the frozen puddles as they jumped in them. The following week the children couldn’t believe their eyes when Elsa had frozen some of our favourite nursery toys. Following a group discussion about melting we investigated the fastest way to melt the ice and found putting them in front of the warm radiators was the most effective. The children practised their cutting skills by making sparkly snowflake decorations to decorate Elsa’s snow castle.

This half term we explored Chinese New Year. This has been one of the children’s favourite themes. We can say happy Chinese New Year in Chinese and we learnt a song all about the different traditions that take place at this special time of year. For snack we had a Chinese buffet, the children really enjoyed exploring the new flavours and some children even tried to use chopsticks. A tradition at Chinese New Year is sending red envelopes full of golden coins to our loved ones. Each child received a red envelope and they counted how many coins they had. Next we used special words like more, less and the same to compare.

The children were showing lots of interest in castles and kings and queens. We set up the scene from Cinderella where the children found a sparkly glass slipper. The children were interested in who the glass slipper belonged to and quickly linked it to Cinderella. The children used cubes to measure their feet and we used special size words to compare them. We made magic fairy godmother wands and made up rhyming spells. Some of our children came up with a fantastic idea to host our very own ball. We wrote invitations to our friends and included special details like who it was to, when and where the ball would take place and who the invitation was from. We had a lovely time dancing and eating party food.

This term we have started our ‘Sound of the Week’. Each week we introduce a new sound and we explore what it looks like, how it sounds, learn a rhyme about it and identify things that begin with the sound. The response from the children has been fantastic and they have been applying the sound during play time.