The Den: 

We have had another busy week this week, with a focus on messy play with autumnal items. 

Characteristics or affective learning: 

With the weather changing, we have been looking at all the leaves collected in the garden. We took the children outside to collect a variety of leaves then brought them inside to paint with. We chose autumnal paint colours like orange, brown, yellow and red. The children really enjoyed using the leaves and sticks collected to paint with. We also added some brushes and sponges to experiment with painting with different textures. We were able to talk lots about what the children were doing and added lots of new vocabulary like “sticks, leaves, dab, paint” and even some positional language like “side-to side” and “up and down”.

Some of the children were reluctant at first to get messy but we were so pleased to see them all overcome the initial unsureness and have a go! The children really enjoyed this! 

Physical development:

We have lots of busy, physical children in The Den, so we’re always looking at ways to redirect the children. This week, we used the jumping board. The children took it in turns to jump in the board and we sang lots of songs like “bouncing balls jump up and down” to the children to encourage them to jump. We were really pleased to see the children taking it in turns and waiting patiently. 

Staffing updates: 

Holly is on annual leave all next week. 

Hillary is on annual leave on Monday 

Parents as partners:

We love to showcase photos of the children around the environment. They always love to find photos of themselves and get excited to point at special people in their family book. It is also a great opportunity to develop the children’s speech and language skills as they can identify special people and staff can prompt them to talk about what they can see. 

If you haven’t already and would like too, please send some photographs of your child with special people. These could be yourself’s as parents, siblings grandparents, cousins and of course- pets! 

These will be used to create family books for your child. 

You could also send photos of your child at the beach, farm or within nature to be used around the environment. 

Please send these photos as a ‘parent observation’. 

You can also share special experiences you get up to via ‘parent observation’ we love seeing what the children get up to outside of nursery.