Nursery- Polar Bears

🌈Hello Nursery!🌈

We are the Polar Bear class, welcome to our Class Page!

Class teacher: Mrs Colman

Teaching Assistant: Mrs Wilkinson

We currently have 29 children, attending for up to 30 hours per week

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2D Shapes

We have been using 2D shapes to create our own representations. We have thought about how to use a particular shape for a reason. We have learnt the names of both 2D and 3D shapes and tried really hard to use mathematical language such as ‘flat’, ‘solid’, ‘sides’ and ‘corners’.

Spring is coming!
We noticed what we thought was “snow” blowing around our nursery outdoor area whilst playing inside. We went outside to investigate. We discovered that it wasn’t snow but it was in fact tiny petals blowing off a nearby blossom tree in the wind! We enjoyed chasing them and catching them and throwing them around. Some of us brought the flowers inside and drew them!

The Very Busy Spider

Our story of the week this week has been ‘The Very Busy Spider’. We created our very own nursery spider web using string. We had to make sure we followed instructions and listened very carefully so our web would work! Once everyone had a piece of our web we tried to add things onto it to pretend that the sticky web had caught something, but the gaps in our web were too big and it didn’t work very well! Later in the week we explored some sticky jelly, Mrs Colman thought it might feel sticky just like a spider’s web.

The Kings Coronation

We have celebrated the Kings Coronation today! Mrs Abbott invited us to come into nursery wearing red, white and blue. We continued the celebrations by creating our own crowns using collage materials and pens and making our own union jack flags by using joining techniques. We then dressed up as royalty, some of us chose to wear our crowns! We were interested to learn all about what would happen on the Coronation day, some of us linked this to Elsa’s coronation day on Frozen and some of us remembered what happened to the Queen last year.

Yoga

We were lucky to have Sheila from Anvesaka Yoga to come into nursery to complete a yoga session with us. She taught us lots of different yoga poses and stretches and linked them to different sea animals from her story! We then played a game and we span the wheel and create the yoga pose it landed on. We were tired from the exercise but it was lots of fun!

We’re Going on an Egg Hunt

We have been getting ready to celebrate Easter this week by reading ‘We’re Going on an Egg Hunt’. We enjoyed using our counting skills to find and count the eggs hidden in the story. We then used collage materials to create an animal from the story. We were excellent at identifying the names for the baby animals! We could choose to collage a lamb (a baby sheep), chick (a baby chicken) or kitten (a baby rabbit).

Jaspers Beanstalk

We have been reading the story ‘Jaspers Beanstalk’. We planted our own beanstalks in the hope that they would grow….and they did! We made sure that we gave them some water and kept them in a bright, airy place in nursery. We enjoyed watching them start from a tiny bean, to a little shoot with roots to a tall stem with leaves! When they were tall enough we took them home to continue their growth! We decided to make our own beanstalk using a tall tube, we used lots of green materials to decorate it and added leaves. I wonder what will be at the top of our beanstalk?

World Book Day

Here is our World Book Day fun! We dressed up and listened to lots of stories in different ways! Year 6 came to read to us, we used puppets to retell stories, we listened to stories on the whiteboard and, of course, we read lots to each other in our own story corner! We have been very busy as you may be able to tell!

Mr Wolfs Pancakes

We read ‘Mr Wolfs Pancakes’ and used our knowledge of the story to create our own pancake batter. We measured, whisked and poured our batter and Mrs Wilkinson cooked it on the hob to make us some delicious pancakes to try!

Birds

As part of RSPB Big School Bird Watch, we have decided to learn about birds this week.

We went on a bird hunt around our school grounds to see if we could spot any birds, we were very excited to find a birds nest in the tree right outside our nursery classroom! We used the bird hide over in Forest Garden to try and help us hide from the birds so they would come closer but we think we may have been a little bit noisy for them! We found some natural resources and collected them to make our very own giant birds nest.

When we came back into nursery, we decided to make birds using our playdough. Mrs Colman enhanced this with sticks, feathers and eyes and we had lots of fun being very creative and seeing what we could make.

We have also created our own bird feeders to try and tempt the birds into our area. We used lard, raisins, cheese and bird seed and combined them altogether into a mixture and scooped them into a cup. When combined, we hung them onto a bush in our nursery outdoor area and waited very patiently...

Darlington Library Visit

We were lucky enough to have Lucy come into nursery from Darlington Library to complete a rhyme time session with us! She talked to us about how to use the library and how we could borrow books from there. We read some stories together, sang some songs from her nursery rhyme bag and played some fun games using the parachute and by dancing! Before Lucy went, she gave us our Bookstart packs to take home so we could share the stories with our grown ups at home!

Lunar New Year

We were interested to learn about Lunar New Year this week. We read the story 'The Great Race' and learnt that it was the year of the rabbit! We enjoyed tasting different foods such as noodles and spring rolls and created our own symmetrical dragons by folding our paper over and printing it.

Slime Exploration!

Winter

We have been reading the story 'Here comes Jack Frost' in nursery. We have learnt about cold colours and mixed our own to create our Winter art by painting onto tin foil. This led us onto making different marks onto the foil in different ways. We experimented by using pens on it and then used the raised stencils to print onto it. We enjoyed exploring and making our own marks in different ways.

Chridtmas holidays PV.docx

Spring 1

Welcome back! We hope you had a exciting but restful Christmas break!

This half term has been very busy for the Polar Bears. We have welcomed new faces into nursery whilst learning all about Winter and exploring birds.

Here are some snippets from the fun we have had!

Autumn 2

Wellbeing Week

This week, we have taken part in the whole school ‘Wellbeing Week’

We started by reading a book called ‘Have You Filled A Bucket Today?’

This got us talking about how we can fill each other’s buckets, and make everyone happy!

We were also challenged to bring in something special from home to share with the class. We had a special Circle Time, where we talked about the special item (mainly toys!) we had brought in, or were able to talk about something special to us at home.

Stay and Play

Thank you for everyone who joined our stay and play. The children really seemed to enjoy showing you around our nursery and we hope you enjoyed it too!

Week 4

A few weeks ago, Nursery were asked to make some decorations for the Christmas Tree Festival in town.
We made lots of different decorations and Mrs Colman delivered them to Town.
There are two trees decorated by Harrowgate Hill, one just by us in Nursery, and one done by the rest of the school!

See if you can find it on your next trip into town, we would love to see pictures of you with our tree - share them on the Class Dojo story!

This got us talking about our own Christmas decorations at home:

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Week 3 - Children in Need

As part of our ‘Spotacular’ Children in Need celebrations, children across the school have been challenged to write poems about spotty things. Nursery were given ‘Ladybirds’ as their focus 🐞

We looked at pictures of ladybirds, and the ladybirds in our mini-beast small world toys and Miss Bailey typed up what we said!

We were also challenged to make flower spot pictures. We decided to make them on biscuits with icing and chocolates! 💐🌺

We also went on a colour hunt around nursery and found lots of different things which were the same colour as Pudsey’s spots

Have a look at the pictures, below

Week 3

This week, it is World Nursery Rhyme week!

You can find out more about it by clicking the image below:

Because of this, our story of the week is Each Peach Pear Plum, as it has references to lots of nursery rhymes and traditional tales.

We are also learning a 'Nursery Rhyme of the Day' with the five official rhymes of 2022!

You can click the images below to play the rhymes, with Makaton signing too!

- The Big Ship Sails on the Ally Ally Oh

- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Once I Caught a Fish Alive

- Five Little Speckled Frogs

- B-I-N-G-O

- Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

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Week 2

This week, Nursery have been very excited to share what they did at the weekend.

We have had lots of stories of attending firework displays and parties at home.

We also made our very own edible sparklers!

We broke up some chocolate and melted it in the microwave. We needed to be careful not to burn it, so we counted to 20 and then gave it a stir. We had lots of fun jumping up and down for each number!

When the chocolate was melted, we dunked a bread stick in, gave it a twist and then added some sprinkles!

They look very yummy - we can't wait to eat them at snack time!

We had a fire drill this week!
Mrs Colman told us we needed to listen for a special alarm, and explained that we needed to listen and follow the grown-ups. Thankfully there wasn’t a real fire in school, but now we know what to do in the unlikely event there is!
We were very good. Mrs Abbott and Mrs Aitken both said they were very impressed with how well we did!

Armistice Day 🌺

We have also been learning all about Remembrance and the significance of the Poppy flower. We watched a beautiful video from Cbeebies, you can watch it too by clicking the image below:

We talked about the War, and the brave soldiers who fought to keep us safe - and how, sadly, some of them did not return home and had died.

Then, we made our own representations of the Poppy, using a variety of media.

On Friday, Armistice Day, Mrs Colman reminded us about the significance of the Poppy, and asked what we could remember:

Nell - "... because of the soldiers"

Cian - " They looked after people"

Jackson - "They were in the War"

Florrie - "The War was dark. Them died"

Cian - "Poppies! They just growed!"

We all sat very well and observed a two minute silence

Seren - "quite... for the poppies"

Zachary - "When I was in Morrisons, in the morning, everyone stopped and it was very quiet. It was for the soldiers"

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Week 1

We had lots of fun at our very own Halloween Party!

We all came to Nursery dressed in our spookiest costumes.

During our party, we danced to Halloween songs, made spooky orange and black playdough, decorated monsters on the painting table and explored pumpkins by hammering golf tees into them!

At the end of the day, the children shouted "Trick or Treat!" and got a yummy treat!

We have also enjoyed reading Meg and Mog, our story of the week.

In our Forest Garden session, we read the story and made our own potions, just like Meg!

Thankfully ours didn't go wrong like Meg's, and no one turned into mice!

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Autumn 1

Week 7

Our story of the week this week has been Room on the Broom

We took the parachute outside and used it to retell the story. We had lots of fun 'Wooshing' it up, every time The Witch took off on her broomstick, and making each of the items fall to the ground in the wind!

At the end of the story, The Witch tells each of the characters she has met on her journey to put an item into her cauldron, and this makes a brand new broom for them all to fly on.

Everyone collected an item they would like to add into our cauldron, and when we said the magic spell "Iggety, Ziggety, Zaggety ZOOM!" and lifted the parachute, there was a huge broomstick for us all to ride!

We worked as a team to make sure we could ride the broomstick safely and had lots of fun!

STEM Week

This week, throughout school, it has been STEM week. Everyone has focused on making their own bridges.

Nursery have explored bridges in their own way, finding one we already had in our outdoor area!

We then used our large outdoor construction to make our own bridges which we could go over and under!

Halloween!

We have also been very interested in making our own Witches and Pumpkin designs using the interactive board. We used a program on Busy Things to help us, and had fun choosing the shapes and colours we wanted on our designs!

Have a look at all of our pictures, here:

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Week 6

Our story of the week this week is Leaf Man.

We have read the story, following the leaf as it rides the wind, and have used the pictures to identify the animals, shapes and colours Leaf Man sees.

Mrs Colman also sent our grown-ups a message on Class Dojo, telling them we have started to notice the leaves changing colour around us. She set us a challenge to find Autumn 'items' over the weekend. Lots of us brought in leaves and conkers we have found, so we added them to the playdough table!

We also went on an Autumn walk around school and Forest Garden. We enjoyed finding leaves and using identification sheets to match the ones we fount. There were lots of Alder, Maple and Sycamore leaves! We used these to make our own representations of 'Leaf Man' and 'Leaf Animals', just like in the story.

Autumn

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Week 5

This week, our book of the week is Elmer!

We read the story together and some of us made some comments as we did:

When we had finished our story, we wondered what we could use to make our own representations of Elmer in Nursery!

We then decided to make our playdough 'patchwork', just like Elmer!

After this, some of us decided we would like to dress up like Elmer, but we didn’t have any bright material!
In our Forest Garden session, we took a big white sheet and looked for natural things to colour it - just like Elmer did with the elephant coloured berries in the story!
We also added a little bit of powder paint into some mud to make our own paint.

🌈Rainbow Toast!🌈

Me made our very own 'Rainbow Toast"!

We used food colour mixed with milk and carefully painted it onto our bread.

Once we were happy with our design, we let it dry out a little before taking a trip to the Staff Room to use the toaster in there!

Once they were all toasted, we ate them for our snack!

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Week 4

The Colour Monster!

This week, we have been reading the story 'The Colour Monster'!

In the story, Colour Monster gets his colours (feelings) all mixed up, so his friend helps him unscramble them and identify what feeling matches each colour.

We used the story to help us understand our feelings:

Yellow = Happiness

Blue = Sadness

Red = Anger

Black = Fear

Green = Calm

Pink = Loved

We then made decided to use colour in our 'messy' area, making our own representations of colour monsters, adding paint in the playdough and even making art in the style of Andy Warhol by colouring our faces to match the feelings!

We then started to wonder what happened when we mixed colours, and read the story 'Mixed'

We used paints to see if we could mix colours, just like in the story!

Have a look at our pictures below!

Week 4 - Colour

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Week 3

🐻There's a BEAR in our garden!! 🐻

Nursery have been very excited to discover a bear has been visiting our outdoor area!

It all started when we found an apple near our bushes - we went to see the apple tree which grows nearby, and talked about where apples come from. After that, we read the story 'Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear' and some of us wondered if The Bear had dropped the apple in the garden!

Nursery thought that The Bear might feel sad, so they wrote it a letter and made some pictures to cheer it up. We hung them in the bush, near the area we found the apple, and left them out overnight. We decided that was the best way, because we have never seen The Bear during the day!

The grown-ups managed to capture some pictures of The Bear looking at our letters, and, as a thank you, it left us everything we needed for our own Teddy Bear’s picnic!

We invited all of the Teddy Bears in school to join us at our picnic, and enjoyed the marmalade sandwiches we made while watching Paddington!