This week at nursery we held a cake sale for The Macmillan Charity.

This week at nursery we have all been busy following the children’s interests. On Friday we held our Macmillan cake sale which we raised £67.52 for this amazing charity. A big thank you to all the staff for baking. 

Baby Nest: 
In baby nest this week we have been encouraging children to use our climbing equipment outside and taking it inside by using the soft play. This encouraged the children to build confidence in their climbing skills or even pull themselves up to standing. Children were able to hold our hand if they wanted as we built a slide into the ball pool as this seems to be a favourite with the soft play. We also enjoyed a lovely walk observing our environment and the sounds. We made cakes and poured ingredients on the scales till it was level with the eggs. We used language such as more and less when balancing the scales, mixing the ingredients together, watching as the consistency changed. The children couldn't wait to get the bun cases out for the cake batter! We also did sensory play in spaghetti. They loved it! The taste and the texture too! They even took their socks off to explore it with their feet. This encouraged them to pick small objects between their finger and thumb. We also explored in and out with pom poms it's was so much fun! Our youngest really enjoyed looking and observing, their eyes following as children passed pom poms. We even scrunched them together but they made a strange squeaking sound that we were not so keen on. We have enjoyed ball play where we explored the different ways the move by spinning and rolling, even throwing and catching. This encouraged us to engage others into our play in turn building our social skills. We have had a fair few visits from spiders in our room this week and the children have been fascinated especially with all their legs and the way they moved, we took extra care to move them back outside though!

Tree House: 
This week in Tree House Room we have looked at having some Autumn based fun. In the water tray we have explored making our own muddy puddle. We used twigs, leaves, conkers and pinecones to explore in the water and mixed in coffee granules to make that muddy colour. We had lots of fun finding our own things in the room to add to our muddy puddle. 
In the sand tray we had an autumn item treasure hunt using the sieve to get rid of the sand and reveal the twigs, conkers and pine cones that had been hidden in the sand. We practiced using tools in different ways to reach our goals and our practitioners helped us to discuss predictions. What would we find and how might we find it. 
On the tuff tray we had a feel and find box. We cut a hole in a show box and hid items inside cotton wool and material then had to place our hand in and guess what the item was by the way it felt. We had great fun guessing. Some times we were right and sometimes it was funny to find it was something different to what we thought. 
We practiced making our own playdough, having all our ingredients out for us and some scales. We scooped and mixed seeing what would happen as we added different ingredients in different amounts. We also got to play with some playdough to 'cement' some bricks together. It helped the towers to stand up longer. 
We made some stick monsters using sticks, googly eyes, pom poms and glue, learning to spread glue to achieve our goal. 
For painting we tried to see what marks pinecones and twigs make on paper. It was fun to see them, but we also enjoyed making marks with the paint brushes as well. 
In our maths area we focused on jigsaws, practicing our skills of fitting objects into spaces. 
Finally the home area this week had lots of different real foods that we were able to share out with each other. Again it has been such an action filled week with lots of opportunities for learning. Let's see what fun we get to have next week.

Toy Town: 
This week in Toy Town we have been having lots of fun. We have been using our different materials to build dens which the children enjoyed. We have explored playdough- we even helped to make the play dough. We then rolled the playdough into small balls and made them into worms and counted how many balls each worm had. We had different autumn spices in the water area with lots of containers to fill and empty. In our sand area we enjoyed making lots of noise by digging out and banging together the different types of metal pans. We had a special visitor in this week, Katie brought her toy horse which we all had a turn on and had lots of fun looking after it- brushing it and feeding it. We also experimented with making tea and coffee this week- we had lots of different kettles and cups and some warm water and we made different tea and coffee- it was fun to pour the water into different pots and pretend to be making tea and coffee for our friends. 
In phonics this week we continued to explore the different types of sounds we can make with our body and with instruments. We have been concentrating on copying back patterns and using the terminology loud and quiet.