This week, the children have been busy exploring the signs of autumn through a variety of hands-on, sensory, and creative activities. They enjoyed lots of play with autumn leaves, using diggers and trucks to scoop, transport, and bury them—building imaginative play and gross motor skills. 

The children experimented with leaf rubbings, noticing patterns and textures – they created beautiful prints. 

Our pumpkin exploration encouraged curiosity and sensory discovery as children touched, scooped, and looked at the seeds. 

Fine motor skills were strengthened through felt tree activities, where children placed and arranged felt leaves and acorns, practising coordination and concentration.

A really wonderful last week of term….🍁🍂🎃

In nursery, we’ve been talking about the signs of autumn 🍂 so we thought it might be nice to go to Forest School and collect some fallen leaves. The children found yellow, orange and red leaves.

The children took a road safety test this afternoon, manoeuvring safely around obstacles, learning about traffic light signals, looking out for people (pedestrians) crossing the road and even helped workmen to fix the road.

Yesterday, Claire from kitchen visited nursery and introduced beetroot to the children, she made some beetroot chocolate cake for them to try.

Following a child’s recent visit to the dentist, the children watched a short programme on CBeebies about a little girl visiting the dentist for the first time. After they, cleaned the play mouth / teeth using a toothbrush and toothpaste. At the end of the day we had a story about a visit to the dentist.

This week we’ve enhanced our role play area, making it a Dental Surgery.

This afternoon, we learnt about germs and they can cause coughs, colds and upset tummies. We reminded ourselves about the importance of  handwashing 🦠 and when we should wash our hands. 

After we sang a song ‘wash your hands’  and the children enjoyed a handwashing activity using water, soap, sponges, toothbrushes and spray bottles.

Acorns baked carrot cake this morning. They learnt a new skill grating carrot using a grater. They used their sense of smell to smell the spice – cinnamon and shared their thoughts about the consistency of the mixture.

This afternoon, we looked at the life cycle of an orange, starting out as a tiny seed planted in the ground, growing into a seedling, into a tree – the tree blossoming in spring and some of the flowers grow into fruit. The children found it interesting oranges change from green to orange when they’re ready to be picked in autumn. We talked about how the tree needs sunlight and water to grow.

The children explored the skin of an orange – it felt soft and smooth and looked shiny. One of the children noticed tiny pores. They also felt some dried orange skin – it was hard.

After, the children enjoyed painting the dried orange skin, Miss Merricks made them into toadstools 🍄.

Shape faces have been made by the children. We used basic shapes; circles, squares, rectangles and introduced semi circles. The children used the shapes appropriately for the task and created some fabulous faces.

At snack time, last week, the children got to taste their crumble…