This week at Nursery, we have had a busy week filled with books and stories! We love to share stories together and this week gave us opportunity to share books with our families too. We enjoyed two visits to our local library and chose our first book to borrow from our lending library.

On our library trips, we enjoyed beautiful Autumn walks to Moor Allerton Library. The sun was shining with blue sky and we enjoyed crunching through the colourful Autumn leaves on the ground! We held hands with our grown-up and walked in a line together, stopping and waiting at each crossing until it was safe to cross. We were very proud of the safe and sensible way in which the children walked through our local area!

We arrived at the library and found the children’s section. We got busy finding different books that captured our interest and shared them with our adults and friends. We remembered to use quiet voices inside the library, turned the pages of our books carefully and tidied them away in the right place once we had finished. We enjoyed the time and space to explore the many different stories that the library had to offer!

Thank you to our families who were able to join us on our visits to Moor Allerton Library. It was a wonderful experience to share and the children loved reading so many exciting stories with their special people! Your support was invaluable!

This week, we all chose a library book to take home in our new book bags! We looked carefully at the front covers to see which would catch our eye. Once we had made our choice, we put our books inside our book bags and took them home at the end of the day to share with our families. We can bring our book bags back into Nursery on Mondays and/or Thursdays to swap our library book for a new one!

This week at Nursery, we introduced our helping hands big question, ‘How can I show that I can listen?’. We enjoyed going on a listening walk around our school grounds, where we learned that we had to be quiet and still to notice and tune into different sounds around us.

As we moved around our school grounds, we heard lots of different sounds, which included birdsong, cars, an aeroplane, a bell ringing, children shouting and a saw on a building site nearby. We showed very careful listening and great excitement as we noticed different sounds around us. We made links to our own knowledge and experiences as we tuned into and named the different sounds. Tuning into environmental sounds is an important part of our phonics learning and will one day help us as we learn to read.

Some of us enjoyed going on listening walks with our families during the half-term holiday. Thank you for joining in with the challenge and sharing with us all of the sounds you heard on your walks!

This week at Nursery, we also explored fireworks as part of our learning about Diwali and Bonfire Night. We listened to different firework sounds and used cardboard tubes to print firework patterns in the night sky.

We also had a go at water painting fireworks on the chalkboard outside. We experimented with creating lines, swirls and splatters with water to represent fireworks in the night sky.

Last week, we each received our own Autumn treasure bag and were set a challenge to notice and collect Autumn treasures when walking to school or on a walk in the local area. We enjoyed getting outside with our families to see what we could find and were incredibly eager to bring our treasures into Nursery to share with our friends and key workers!

Here we are enjoying our Autumn walk and searching for Autumn treasures!

Some of us decided to use some of our Autumn treasures to create some fantastic works of art. So many rich and beautiful colours in the autumn leaves!

We brought our Autumn treasure bags back to Nursery to share with our friends during key group time. We were all very excited to show what we had found and talk about our Autumn walks. As a group, we collected conkers, pine cones, acorns, sticks and leaves of many different colours to share together. We will use our treasures next half-term as we continue to explore Autumn around us through our learning.

This week, we also welcomed our families to our Diwali Stay and Play. We had a wonderful time together as we had a go at a range of different Diwali-themed activities.

Thank you to our families who were able to join our stay and play session!

This week at Nursery, we have been exploring our big question, ‘How can I show kindness?’ as part of our Black History Month learning. We learnt that the post box was invented by an important figure named Philip B Downing. We spent time thinking about why this was such an important invention and shared what we know about post boxes. We knew that we use them to post letters, cards and parcels when we want to give something to someone. Some of us had used one to post a letter before.

We created our own kindness cards to post in our own Nursery post box. We thought about who we would like to make a card for and what we wanted our message to say. We got busy mark-making with crayons to design our card. Our adults helped us to scribe our message and some of us had a go at representing our own name.

Once we had finished, we put our kindness cards in the post box. We thought about how Philip B Downing’s invention has helped us to share kindness through cards, letters and parcels with the people who are special to us. We were all very excited for our kindness cards to be delivered to our special person we had chosen.

Damen created his kindness card for his friend Theo, with a kind message inside to thank him for being a good friend and playing with him. Damen couldn’t wait to hand deliver his card to his friend, and Theo was equally excited to receive this act of kindness!

For our group times, we learnt to sign and sing to the song, ‘Lean on Me’ by Bill Withers. We talked about what it meant to ‘lean on’ our friends and linked this to being kind to one another. We worked really hard to practise the lyrics and the signs to a part of the song. We also learnt that Bill Withers is a very important figure in music as part of our learning within Black History Month.

This week at Nursery, we have started to notice the signs of Autumn in the world around us. We really enjoyed going on an Autumn walk in the woodland on our school grounds. We decided to collect Autumn treasures to bring back to Nursery to look closely at and explore. Before we set off, we talked together about holding our friend’s hand, walking together as a group and keeping safe when leaving our EYFS playground. The sun was shining which made for a beautiful Autumn walk.

When we arrived, we started to wonder about what we might find. We shared our own thoughts, talking about different leaves, sticks, pine cones and conkers. As we started to look around, we noticed that there were leaves of many different colours, shapes and sizes. We decided that we would try to collect as many different types of leaves as possible. We showed great teamwork and collaboration as we filled our buckets with lots of interesting Autumn treasures!

We showed great excitement as we found lots of wonderful Autumn materials. We enjoyed showing our friends and adults what we had found.

Here are some of the beautiful Autumn treasures we found on our walk!

We carried our treasures back to Nursery where we will use them to explore Autumn in different ways. Next week, your child will take home an Autumn treasure bag. We would like the children to continue to notice signs of Autumn with their families at home. The children can fill their treasure bag with leaves, sticks, conkers, pine cones, acorns and bring it back to Nursery. We would love to see some photographs of the children on their Autumn treasure hunt! We will then share what we have found together at Nursery and use our treasures to support our learning.