| Nursery
Throughout October the Toddlers have been focusing on the world around them.
We started our learning by looking for signs of autumn in our outdoor spaces as well as collecting natural objects to use in our role play and creative areas. The children have learnt about changes; the changing colours of the leaves and explored their scissor skills by cutting up leaves and play dough.
Their interests in animals then led our learning onto hibernation. The hibernation activities gave the children plenty of opportunities to think about textures, play games like hide & seek, learn new songs, extend their creativity, develop their listening and attention skills and support their mathematical development.
The children’s interest in music and animals allowed us to combine the two by listening to some classical music while watching autumnal animals on the big screen and then use their physical skills to be the animals - spreading their arms o
ut wide to fly like an owl, crawling and making themselves really small to be a hedgehog.
The children have had further opportunities to extend their motor skills through scissor skills as they made snips in the bread dough to make hedgehog spikes.
The children have also been extending their language skills and beginning to describe objects (including describing the textures) by playing feely box games with natural objects. We extended our imagination skills by making our own props for our bear hunt adventures. We made binoculars and then used them whilst enacting the story while exploring the nursery grounds.
One of their favourite autumnal songs was the Scarecrow Scarecrow action rhyme, this led our learning onto Harvest Festival where the children explored growth and decay, as well as extending their skills through various cooking activities like making carrot cake and vegetable soup. This time the children used safe knives to cut the vegetables and explored their senses of smell and taste.
October is also Black History Month which we really wanted to capture to extend our children's knowledge of the world. We have explored great inventors like Garrett Morgan - a black inventor who invented the traffic lights. We started off learning who Garrett Morgan was, and what he did. We then enjoyed some traffic light rhymes including red light stop, green light go, and twinkle twinkle traffic light. Then set up a small world area with the cars, car mat, road signs, traffic lights and cars. In the creative area the children enjoyed making a junk model traffic light. They have continued to explore their senses as we introduced them to new foods and smells, had rice and lentil play and use vibrant colours and shapes in our art. Our Black History learning continues as we look forward to also exploring great sporting achievements, inspirational musicians and more inventors.