What are we doing in Sea Turtles in January?

The children love nursery rhymes, puppets and stories and have (particularly recently) all really enjoyed, learning new actions to new rhymes. To further support this, we’ll be having a month focussed on nursery rhymes, story books and songs.

 

The activities this month will be based around the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) areas of learning:

Prime areas:

C&L: Learning new words and actions to songs, extending their communication and language repertoire. PSED: Sharing new experiences and communication in learning new songs and actions with friends.  PD: Gross motor skills; moving with whole bodies and fine motor skills; finger plays and small actions.

Specific areas:

UW: Learning songs and finger plays from another language. EA&D: Creating art works, dressing up, dance. M: Learning rhymes with numbers. Counting and noticing when something has been taken away.

 Some of the activities we will be doing this month will involve:

·         Making puppets. Laura will be helping the children to make simple puppets to use in their songs and rhymes.

·         Character guessing. Sarah G will be making some character shapes with the children and getting them to guess what the characters are and then reading the story, doing the actions and songs.

·         Collaging. Chloe will be setting up some collages on paper shaped with nursery rhyme characters to do with the children while singing nursery rhymes.

·         Puppet Shows. Sara and Ella will be setting up lots of nursery rhymes and story puppet shows for the children to watch and take part in.

·         Nursery rhyme cards. Sarah Louise will be making some nursery rhyme flash cards for the children to look at. She’ll also be making a display of nursery rhymes for everyone to add to.

 Some ideas to support your children at home:

·         Pull out all the old traditional nursery rhymes and start reading and singing them.

·         If your child has a particular favourite, share it with the team so we can make sure we focus on it for them at nursery too.

·         When you are out and about, point out nursery characters. You’ll see them on cots, in shop windows, bowls, etc. They are everywhere, you just have to notice. Point to them and sing or say the song/ rhyme.

·         Learn the rest of the words to the rhymes you only half remember. You can find lyrics and words to everything on the web.

·         http://www.rhymes.org.uk/ this one is a good start.

What are we doing in Dolphins for January?

Building!!!

A lot of fun has been going on recently with the construction toys; building houses, tracks, buildings, etc. So, we are going to do some extension work on this and look at a range of different types of building and materials.

The activities this month will be based around the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) areas of learning:

Prime areas:
C&L: Sharing ideas, what we know and asking questions to find out more.  PD: Using hand tools and different types of medial to piece together model buildings. PSED: Playing and working in groups, feeling good about taking on others ideas and confident in sharing own.

Specific areas:

UW: Showing curiosity and learning about other people around the world, their countires and their types of building. L: Showing an interest in different books; fact and fiction and using books as a resource in learning more about buildings. EA&D: Using different materials to construct, build, balance, join and collage. M: Learning about size, shape, positioning, height, etc of buildings.

 Some of the activities we will be doing this month to support this will be:

·         Woodwork. The children will be using different tools to make some model buildings with Jenny.

·         Making a castle. The children will be making a castle using all of the boxes that come in with deliveries this month.

·         Three Little Pigs. The children will be hearing the story, role playing and talking about why different materials work better and making some collages with Laura Z.

·         Bridge building. Christine H will be helping the children to improve their bridge building techniques with some different ideas on what we are doing.

·         Making mud huts. The children will be looking at a variety of images of different types of mud huts from around the world and then the children will have a go at making them.

·         Den making. Jenny will be helping the children to build dens using materials from around the nursery and Forest School supplies.

 

What you could do to support your children at home:

·      Stop off and look at a construction site. Talk about what is going on. Often there are vision panels where you can take a look.

·      Look at the different types of residential housing in your area and on outings. Talk about terraced houses, blocks of flats, apartment blocks, semi’s and detached houses.

·      Look at other types of buildings; office buildings, fire stations, hospitals. Talk about why they need to be bigger, who uses them, etc.

·      Go through central London and look at the gargoyles, griffins, different types of doors,  talk about the different decorations.