Week Ending 13th of February

We thoroughly enjoyed sharing the traditional story of The Great Race, learning how the animals raced to decide the order of the Chinese zodiac years. The children loved listening to the story and joining in with discussions about the animals and their adventures. 🐀🐂🐅📖

Our Little Gems focused on the lovely story Maisy’s Chinese New Year, which provided a simple, engaging introduction to the festival and supported our younger learners beautifully. 💛📘

The children have had so much fun exploring our Chinese New Year sensory tray, filled with red and yellow rice, red and gold objects, coins, red envelopes, and golden bags to scoop, fill, and empty. This supported sensory exploration, fine motor skills and lots of curiosity! 🌾🧧✨

Our Chinese restaurant role play area has been extremely popular! The children enjoyed pretending to order food, use chopsticks, pack food for delivery, and add coins to the till. This role play supported communication skills and early mathematical development through exploring money. 🍜🥢💰

We’ve also loved dragon dancing both inside and outside! Outside, the children worked together using a dragon mask, moving in a line around the playground. Inside, we used instruments and scarves to develop bilateral movements and rhythm – so much joy and energy! 🐲🎶🧣

Inspired by The Great Race, the children took part in running races, just like the animals in the story. There was lots of cheering, laughter and teamwork! 🏃‍♂️🏁

We also explored mark making in the sand using chopsticks, supporting fine motor control and early writing skills in a fun and meaningful way. ✍️🏖️

To extend our learning even further, we tasted some Chinese-style food including noodles, prawn crackers and spring rolls – yummy! 😋🍜

      

Week Ending 6th of February

What a wonderful and colourful week we’ve had in Gems Nursery as we enjoyed the much-loved repetitive story “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”! The children have loved joining in with the repeated phrases, confidently naming the animals and colours they could see in the story. 

We’ve had a huge focus on recognising colours during both carpet times this week. Our Big Gems took part in an exciting colour hunt around the classroom and school, carefully spotting and naming different colours in their environment. 🎨👀

The children also enjoyed exploring colour mixing, discovering some magical results! We learned that red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, and yellow + red = orange. There were lots of excited reactions as new colours appeared before their eyes! 🟥➕🟦🟪

Our colourful tuff tray was a big hit, where the children worked together to place the correct coloured pasta into the matching sections. This was a brilliant opportunity for teamwork, communication and problem-solving as they collaborated to move all the pieces into the right places. 🍝🌈

We saw some fantastic role play once again in our Vets area. The children showed great care and empathy as they looked after the animals, using medicine and bandages and confidently acting out roles such as vets and nurses. 🩺🐶

In our investigation area, we explored animal footprints using the animals from the story, carefully distinguishing between the different prints and matching them to the correct animals. 🐾🔍

We also enjoyed following instructions during our time in the small hall. Animal mats were placed around the room, and when the music stopped, the children listened carefully to instructions such as “Find the mat with the black sheep on!”. This was a fun way to practise listening, attention and movement. 🎶🐑

    

Week Ending 30th of January

What a fantastic week we’ve had in Gems Nursery as we explored the much-loved story “The Tiger Who Came to Tea”!

The children have really enjoyed retelling the story using the pictures, confidently recalling what the tiger ate and drank. We loved hearing them quote, “He ate all the sandwiches, all the cakes, all the milk and all the water!” 📖✨

In our finger gym, the children became tiger feeders, using fine motor skills to pick up and name different food items from the story. This was a great way to build hand strength and coordination while encouraging lots of lovely language. 🥪🧁🤏

Our maths area was buzzing with pattern-making as the children created ABAB patterns using orange and black multilink cubes to match the tiger’s stripes. They were so proud of their work and even corrected the teachers when a pattern went wrong! 🟧⬛🟧⬛

In the creative area, the children developed their shoulder strength and control by painting big, bold tiger stripes. Using large up-and-down movements with their paintbrushes, they created some wonderful tiger artwork. 🎨🐯

Our tuff tray was a big hit, filled with rice, teacups, saucers and cupcake cases. The children loved filling and emptying, pouring and scooping, and talking about full and empty, building their understanding of capacity through hands-on play. 🍚☕

We also enjoyed our music and movement time with “Down in the Jungle”, clapping, boogying and moving our bodies in different ways. Lots of smiles and giggles all around! 🎶🕺

Our Vets role play area has been incredibly popular. The children took great care of their animals using stethoscopes, bandages, thermometers and syringes. There was lots of imaginative play as they organised their own scenarios and worked together to look after their much-loved pets. 🐶🩺🐱

      

Week Ending 23rd of January

What a wonderful week we’ve had in Gems Nursery as we explored the lovely story “Owl Babies”! 🦉✨

In our finger gym, the children became owl carers, carefully using tweezers to feed the baby owls some wiggly “bugs.” This activity was fantastic for developing hand strength, coordination and focus. 🐛🤏

Our sensory tray was filled with rice and painted owls of different sizes. The children enjoyed transporting the rice from one place to another, comparing big and small owls and talking about their sizes — linking beautifully to the characters Sarah, Percy and Bill from our story.

In the creative area, the children loved designing and making their own owls using a range of materials. Each owl was unique, and the children took great pride in their creations. 🎨🦉

Our Little Gems had lots of fun moving like different owls — using big, wide movements for Mummy Owl and tiny, gentle movements for the baby owls. This helped them explore body awareness, balance and changing positions in a playful way.

Our Big Gems learned about nocturnal and diurnal animals, discovering that nocturnal animals come out at night and diurnal animals come out during the day. The children enjoyed sorting and talking about which animals belong in each group. 🌙☀️

In phonics, we had lots of laughs with our Silly Soup game, learning about rhythm and rhyme. We also enjoyed our favourite books “Oi Dog” and “Oi Cat”, and had so much fun rhyming our own names:
“Mrs Barnes sits on yarn. Mrs Bray sits on hay!” — lots of giggles all around! 😄📚

    

Week Ending 16th of January

This week, our book focus was “Bear Snores On”. The children loved learning about hibernation and discovering what animals do during the colder months.  Our Little Gems enjoyed the book “What Do You See in Winter?”, where the children helped find and count different winter-themed objects — a great way to develop observation and number skills. ❄️🐻

In our creative and fine motor areas, the children explored mark making in flour, using their fingers and tools to create different lines and shapes. They also enjoyed winter animal footprint painting, learning to distinguish between different marks and patterns made by various animals. 🎨👣

The children worked on pattern making using counting bears, showing great focus as, they created repeating patterns. In our finger gym, they had lots of fun creating bear faces, strengthening their hand and finger muscles through playful activities. 🐻✨

For our “What’s in the Box?” activity, we discovered bird feeders and fat balls. The children were excited to hang them up outside and use their bird checklist to spot and identify birds visiting our outdoor area. This led to some lovely discussions about caring for wildlife in winter. 🐦🌿

We also enjoyed playing the “Don’t Wake the Bear” game, where the children carefully passed jingle bells around a sleeping bear, trying to be as quiet as possible. Lots of giggles and great listening skills were on display!

To finish the week, the children moved through our obstacle course, pretending to be hibernating animals. Some chose to be bears, snakes, tortoises and squirrels, demonstrating wonderful imagination and movement skills. 🐿️🐢

    

Week Ending 9th of January 

We truly hit the jackpot with the snow at the start of the week! ❄️ This tied in perfectly with our book of the week, “One Snowy Night”. The children were fascinated by the snowy scenes and enjoyed the anticipating of who was knocking on the door of Percy's hut each time.

During carpet times, our older children have been learning about animals that live in cold climates, talking about how they keep warm and where they live. 🐧🐻‍❄️
Our “What’s in the Box?” activity was a big hit this week too! Inside was a mystery selection of clothing and accessories for both cold (winter) and hot (summer) weather. The children did a fantastic job of differentiating which items were suitable for winter and explaining their choices — great thinking and vocabulary development. 🧤🧢👒

Our younger children have enjoyed learning about winter animals during their carpet times using the stories “That’s Not My Penguin” and “That’s Not My Reindeer”. They loved exploring the different textures and joining in with repeated phrases. 📚🐧🦌

In our creative area, the children explored tin foil painting, observing the shiny surface as they made marks. 🎨✨ Some children were even able to paint star and snowflake-like shapes, showing control and imagination.

Outside, we focused on exploring the environment safely while investigating ice. 🧊 The children discovered different shapes of ice frozen in tyres and tuff trays, and used wooden hammers to carefully chip away. Some pieces of ice had hidden objects inside, which the children worked together to “rescue” — lots of excitement, problem-solving and teamwork!