2-3 The Discovery Hub

We began the week with another exciting session of yoga with Fay on Monday afternoon. This week the children worked on deep breathing to blow pompoms from their hands and across the floor. They particularly enjoyed walking along the balance beam, learning to hold their arms out to support themselves in balancing. The children had so much fun with this, that we provided further opportunities to develop these skills throughout the week, including using balancing beams outdoors, and textured stepping stones indoors. We saw the children’s confidence in using the equipment grow as they became more familiar with it and developed their coordination and balance with practice. Well done everyone! 

Characteristics of effective learning – finding out and exploring 

This week we reflected on how our sunflower plants started as seeds and have grown into plants. We looked at some real sunflowers that have bloomed, to see what our sunflowers will eventually look like. These were then displayed in our studio area for the children to explore through observing, touching and smelling them. We provided paint colours inspired by the sunflowers, for the children to explore. The children used some fantastic language to narrate the process as they painted:

“I’ve made light green.”

“Lots of black.”

“A stem….more stems.”

“Yellow, like this bit”, pointing at the petals of the sunflower. 

The children have been using large tongs to transfer and sort pinecones this week. Using the tongs helps to strengthen hand muscles and support the development of fine motor skills. Arranging the items into trays with different numbers of spaces also helps develop awareness of quantity. The children showed super concentration in using the tongs for transferring!

Outdoor learning 

Following last week’s interest in rolling and sliding items downhill outdoors, this week we built upon this exploratory play, by building mark-making into it. 

We provided paint trays and paper. The children then explored dipping items into the paint and rolling them down the hill to experiment with the marks they could make. They chose to try lots of different objects, including trucks, balls and tyres. Some children decided to test what would happen if they tried different sized stones. They discovered that the stones needed a bit of a push to help them along! This then progressed into children finding out other ways they could create marks with the paint, for example, using a rake.

The children have enjoyed using different resources for ‘cooking’ at our outdoor kitchen this week. Through this play the children explored acting out a familiar experience. They used language to pretend that objects represented other items from their experience, for example, the rocks became ‘chips’!

Further role-play outdoors included washing the doll’s clothes. The children washed the clothes in our water tray and used pegs to hang the clothes up on a washing line. This also provided the opportunity for counting, for example, getting two pegs out of the container at a time and counting how many items we had hung up. 

Story of the week: Sam Plants a Sunflower 

Song of the week: Mr Golden Sun

Alongside our story and song, we have been learning and using the Makaton sign for ‘sun’.

Parents as partners

For children who attend for breakfast, this is available for anyone arriving between 8.00am and 8.45am. After this time, breakfast is tidied away in order for staff to be available to greet and support the arrival of all other children at 9.00am, and begin the transition into our welcome group time. 

Nursery is closed tomorrow, Friday 20th June, for staff training.

We hope everyone has a wonderful weekend in the sunshine and look forward to seeing you all next week.