2-3: The Discovery Hub

We hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year! We have had a lovely week having the chance to meet our new families and children in nursery this week. The children returning from the holidays have settled in so well as they returned to explore their favourite areas in the environment. We are very proud of all of the children this week accessing the nursery environment.

Across the week, the children have been discussing with staff all about their experiences. Please feel free to send any photos in for the children to share with their peers and key workers.

This week, the children have been exploring their favourite areas and continuing to develop their play ideas. It has been lovely to see the children keen to explore the areas with their peers. Our playdough area, dinosaur and trains have been very popular across the week.

The children have been very excited to talk about the changes to the weather. We have had many discussions about the snow we had earlier in the week. Some of the children talked about how they had made snowmen at home and we followed up looking at images of snowmen discussing the features such as eyes, a carrot nose and arms. Following the interest with snow, we explored bringing some snow into the nursery into our water area to explore. The children explored feeling the snow commenting “it cold” and “oh freezing”. We explored adding some fish and animals to the snow and the children noticed the imprints that were made when moving them around the snow. The children noticed the snow had “gone” and we had “water” in the tray. They then asked for “more snow” and we collected some more from outside in our garden.

Later in the week, the children noticed some ice in a tray in the garden. We explored the ice with our hands and the children commented how cold it was on their fingers. The children the began trying to break the ice into smaller pieces. They used problem solving ideas as they used blocks and spoons to break the ice before exploring dropping the ice from a height into the tray. The children used language such as “break” “small” and “smaller” to describe the ice. They explored gathering other resources such as bowls and spoons to use to collect the ice together. We listened to the noise the ice made as the children shook the bowls.

Staffing Updates

We would like to welcome Georgia to the Nursery who will be working alongside Janine in the office.

On Monday, we had a staff training day where staff completed Safeguarding training and various reflective practice training opportunities. As a team we had time to reflect on our environments and develop areas as well as time to reflect on the children’s previous interests in the previous term.

Parents as Partners

Please can we ask parents/carers to check your child’s profile to make sure all details are up to date for your child’s basic info section, health section, allergies, sensitive information and contacts information/people collecting.

Also, can we ask for parents to message staff with any updates or changes if your child has a sleep limit for in nursery.

The Nursery Team