July reflection

Dolphins as usual have had a really busy and active month with loads of time spent outside. Gardening has been a favourite and since all of our work has been done in our pots, we are just doing lots of watering and to keep the fingers busy and the love of gardening going, we have been doing plenty of gardening role play too.

Carole has been doing lots of poetry and stories from around the world with the children, particularly the older children during rest time. The children have loved this and it has prompted loads of discussions about where the children have family around the world. So far in poems and stories she has taken us to the Philippines, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, France and Czech Republic.

Laura J has been doing wooly collages with the children. She has been helping them to cut wool of different colours shapes and sizes that they want and then collage it to make their pictures. Laura has also been making grass skirts with the children in readiness for our Hawaiian Beach Party BBQ.
Laura Z has been doing some cute little collages with the children, making palm trees and lady pineapples. Some of them are really cute and the children have concentrated really hard to get all the pieces in the places they want them.

Lan has been making leis with the children out of little flowers she has taught some of them to cut, paint and card strips to stick them on..

Laura W has also been making leis and talking with the children about how leis are used as a welcome in Hawaii. It’s been great for their fine motor skills as they push the little tissue flowers onto bodkins and down onto the string.

She has also spent a lot of time with the children looking at flashcards of images of different cultures and countries, talking about the different customs of the countries.

Christine H made a fish tank with some of the younger the children. They painted card fish that she had made and then strung them up in a box painted by the children. She helped children make telescopes from tubes by encouraing them to choose tubes, paint and decorate them. Then they were able to use them in play.
Rachel has been helping the children to paint big palms trees together to decorate our barbecue. There is something the children find really satisfying about applying loads of paint up and down to a big surface.

And Jenny has seen her pre-schoolers year end with their final excursion to the Tropical Zoo. They had an amazing time feeding tortoises, snakes, creepy crawlies and loads more. If you have not been there it is a zoo worth visiting if you are brave and if you are not, you might need to pretend you are for the sake of your child. http://www.tropicalzoo.org/.

It was a big month for Seaturtles. We went from Seahorses and Starfish to Sea Turtles this month, joining the two rooms together to create one group with more freedom and more options for play depending on their mood. So we now have a quiet room, where sleeping, sensory play, books, puzzles, heuristic play goes on with quiet music always playing in the back ground. It’s been great for children who just need a bit of space and for babies sleeping throughout the day too. And, for the teachers to have some time with a bit of peaceful quiet play too is a breather.

We also have an ‘active room’ for louder play, exploring equipment at different heights, encouragement to pull themselves up, climb, interact, play with water, the home corner, musical instruments, arts and crafts, blocks and a range of different equipment.

But most of the time, the children who want to be ‘busy’ have been outside. We’ve had a great month for weather and have been able to take the arts and crafts outside, loads of cooling water play, sand play, gardening and climbing about the equipment. It has also been wonderful to be able to eat our snacks and some of our teas outside too. We’ve even been able to fit in a trip to the park.

A lot of the activities this month have been around our focus on Hawaii. We have our big summer barbecue at the start of August and so these are some of the activities that we have been doing to get into the spirit…
Manjit has been supporting the children in making Hawaiian flowers, tropical fish and Tiki Gods. She also helped a group of children to bake pineapple cake and muffins. These were delicious, the children devoured them and so did the teachers!
Sarah supported the children in making some Hawaiian skirts, necklaces, palm trees and pineapples. These are really groovy and look great!
Beata helped the children to make little flowers with circles of tissue paper all stuck together.

And, Megan helped the children make some Hawaiian pizzas with a small group which were enjoyed by everyone.

June reflection

Dolphins, Seahorses and Starfish had a great month of insects and creepy crawlies exploration.

These are some of the activities they have done…
Laura Z in the Dolphins made some little puzzles for the children out of images of different types of insects and then cut them up to make puzzles out of them. The children pieced them all together to rebuild the images and guess the names of the insects. The children learned some new insects in the process such as a lady bird spider. And if you didn’t know what one was, here it is- they’re kind of cute don’t you think?

Laura Z. also made some bumble bees with the children. She made a model one and the children had all the pieces together to choose where they go and they made some fantastic attempts at some bees that really do look like bees!

Christine H. introduced some new insects stampers that the Dolphins children drew around to make insects outlines. They then cut them out with scissors and decorated them. Generally, the children’s ability with scissors is very competent and they are regularly looking for things to cut around in magazines and tracing other items such as their hands to then cut out.

Laura W supported the Dolphins children to make some really gorgeous little spiders out of foam eggs, pipe cleaners, paint and buggy eyes. They are adorable and the children loved making them. Actually, as soon as the beady eyes come out of the collage cupboard they are pretty excited!

She also set up a great insect collage table with foam pieces cutting up some pieces for the children to use, but also getting the children to use off cuts and their own cut up pieces to build their insect collages. This was great for all abilities and some children made amazingly advanced pictures like the caterpillar here and others made pieces that were a bit more rough around the edges and just as brilliant.

Rachel set up an insect stencil activity that all of the Dolphin children took part in. Some of the children drew around stencils, cut them out carefully and created patterns in them. Others drew around them and left them as a collection of images on paper and coloured them and some just did lots of stencil prints with no colour. This was a lovely quiet activity with children coming and going as they did their but with lots of support to the especially young Dolphins to encourage them into the world of arts and crafts. The butterfly was by far the most popular stencil.

Laura J did some dramatic play with the children outside by setting up dens for insects. She draped fabric about to made the dens and then got inside the dens with the children to pretend to be insects coming and going from their den to collect food and bring it back to their insect friends!
Throughout the month in Dolphins, while we were exploring all sorts of insects, pirates took over our nursery.

Lan made a collection of head scarfs with different themes on them and the pirates were by far the most popular….so Lan had to make a few more last minute to keep all our pirates happy. Every morning after breakfast our pirates grabbed their head scarfs and so the day began and soon we were making pirate ships, printing of treasure maps and hiding gold coins around the nursery to be found, reading stories about pirates and making all sorts of impromptu piratey type things!

Carole read the favourite story for the month, The Troll, which involved pirates, treasure chests, maps and walking the plank!

Seahorses and Starfish planned together this month and also followed an insect topic after all the bug collecting in our plants of the month before.

Sarah helped the starfish make some really groovy spider pictures by painting card spider bodies and gluing on straws for legs. The lovely thing about the children doing it and sticking the straws in all sorts of random positions is that somehow the spiders look even cuter!

Sarah also set up red and green ant making activities, caterpillar collages and water play filled with all sorts of insects in the water. The lovely thing about the Starfish is that they love getting really sticky with glue and slippery with the paint and just wallow in the joy of exploring the different sensations.

Manjit set up for the children a really neat little ‘bugs in the night’ small world activity. She used dark coloured sand, twigs, leaves and set the children to work moving and playing the little plastic bugs through the mini wilderness. So many different tectures to feel in this and some of the chldre really got into moving the bugs about and others really focussed on feeling the( different quality of this sand to our sand tray) sand in their fingers, the leaves and twigs.

She also set up a great little activity of making ‘snail trails’ on paper using string and silver paint. They trailed the strings around the paper leaving behind trails of silver paint like snail trails.

Manjit also helped the children make spiders using different materials to Sarah. She made them with black and brown fur, glued onto egg boxes with googly eyes.

For the smaller children Emily set up a butterfly making activity using glitter of different colours, lots of glue and mess on paper. It was fantastic and the children loved the flicking about of glitter, sticky hands on paper and everything getting caught on their hands including the glitter, the paper and them selves! The process was such fun and the end result was pretty gorgeous too.

With a lady bird colour concept, Emily also set up some fun sponge painting with red and black colours to dip round sponges into and onto paper. Of course it was a mess and the images to the uninformed eye and probably to the babies as well, were nothing like lady birds, but the point was an activity that was fantastic exploratory fun.

Beata made some lovely summery pictures with the babies of shapes of birds, butterflies, etc using sponges to absorb and stamp water colours onto yellow and blue paper. Lots of the babies really preferred to use their fingers- dipping them into the paint and smearing them about the paper, the table, their aprons and them!

She also made some fun giant flies with the babies. They were able to stamp black paint onto cut out fly shapes and then stick tissue paper about to make a kind of winged effect.

But other great spontaneous fun was the wonderful summery weather that meant we got out the giant submarine paddling pool for the children to splash about in for the day. It was so much fun and really made us all feel we were on holiday at nursery! We’ve also been able to do excursions to Mortlake park to search for bugs, more gardening and may we add that the gardens in both the under two’s and over two’s play grounds are looking amazing with flowers! And we have even had some fantastic water play with flowers and glitter- how pretty is that!?

Dolphins edible garden is also looking just incredible. Our tomato plants are the biggest and most flowery and green tomato bud bursting that we have ever seen them. Our pumpkins are going strong and we are not quite sure how we are going to manage them because there is a long way to go till pumpkin harvest! And our strawberries, while not enough to feed us all, but mixed with a few bought in ones was a really special and satisfying event.

July plans

What are we doing throughout the nursery this month?
August the 5th is our Summer Barbecue and this year’s theme is Hawaiian Beach Party.
So dust off your grass skirts, leis, Hawaii

Five-0 shirts and we will have a party!

And for us at the nursery, children and teachers will be getting prepared with lots of activities to get the party decorated, bright and an event to be getting excited about!
The activities this month will be based around the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) areas of learning:

KUW-learning about another culture, its traditions and uniqueness PSED- confidence in their abilities to make things. MD- size, shape, pattern, quantities and qualities of all the new things we will be making and exploring. CLL naming, discussing, learning words from another language. PD music and movement to Hawaiian music. Fine motor skills in threading leis CD- loads of different types of arts and crafts, dancing, music and movement.

Some of the activities we will be doing in Dolphins this month to support this will be:
• Rachel will be talking about the barbecue what we are doing and why while making some palm trees with the children to get the set started.
• Laura J will be helping children to make some grass skirts from newspaper and taking about grass skirts, looking at images, etc.
• Laura J is also going to be doing some collage with the children of Hawaiian images.
• Lan is planning on making some Hawaiian images, laminating and letting children explore and talk about a range of Hawaiian images.
• Christine has already started her tropical fish tank with the children and will be taking a small group of children with Su on an excursion to the Tropical Fish shop.
• Laura Williams will be making Leis with the children.
• Jenny and Laura Z will be taking a group of children on an excursion to the library to collect some information about Hawaii.
• Jenny will be making some palm trees with the older children out of wood and painting them.

Some of the activities we will be doing in Sea turtles this month to support this will be:
• Manjit will be working with the children to make some tropical fish and also a tropical garland display.
• Beata will be making some tropical landscapes pictures and tropical flowers.
• Megan will be making helping the children to decorate Hawaiian flags with the children.
• Megan will be hanging some tropical mobiles from the arch for children to explore.
• Sarah-Louise will be working with the children to make some cardboard coconuts through painting and sticking.
• Sarah G will be making some flower leis with the children.
• Emily will be doing some music and movement with the children to Hawaiian music.
• Manjit will be making pineapple cake with the children.
• Sarah G will be making pineapple and palm trees with the children.
• Sarah Louise will be making Hawaiian pizzas with the children for tea.

What you could do to support your children at home:
• Start planning your barbecue outfit with your child! Parents are welcome to dress up too and the more colourful we are the more cheerful the occasion!
• Go to the library and take out a book about Hawaii or buy one.
• Download the odd Hawaiian piece of music for the children to listen to.
• Make a tropical smoothie with your child and talk about the fruits you have used.
• Make them a lei at home- children love dressing up in leis!
• And on a summer theme- take them to Southbank- they have a great beach set up, really neat beach huts, lots of performances and an amazing atmosphere. It’s not Hawaiian at all- totally Indo-British, but it is well worth a trip for some summer festivities and fun.