Up, up and away!

Leave a comment October 29, 2023 juicenursery

Well, what a fabulous first half term we’ve had in Green Room! We’ve loved getting to know the children and finding out more about them from their ‘About Me’ bags. It’s fascinating to see how different all the children’s interests are. Everyone has settled really well into the routines including tidy-up time, toileting, mealtimes and getting ready for Muddy Mornings.

During these first few weeks, sharing the children’s interests and items from their ‘About Me’ bags has been incredibly popular, as well as all the lovely learning opportunities that Autumn affords us. We are looking forward to sharing some festivals and celebrations in the coming weeks. If your family has a particular religious celebration coming up, we would love it if you could pop in and tell the Green Room children all about it. We promise we’re not at all scary and will make you feel very welcome! Another thing we’d love you to do if you have time to visit would be to read a story to us – please email greenroom@juicenursery.com if you can spare some time!

We were blessed this week with glorious weather for Muddy Morning and this gave us the perfect opportunity to create, decorate and launch some paper aeroplanes. The children have been asking for us to make them in the classroom for a week or so – maybe it all started with the conker comets the other week! They’ve also continued to enjoy mark-making with the chunky chalks so we took those along too.

Since the Juice Nursery Scarecrow moved into our garden recently, the children have continued to be fascinated by him so we introduced them to the story of The Scarecrows’ Wedding. This book afforded us the perfect opportunity to spot and suggest rhyming words and the children loved joining in as Jennifer read the book during carpet time. You could try this at home too – share a rhyming book with your child and stop before you get to the last word on the line. Can they guess what it will be?

As you know, we love to follow the children’s own interests and provide opportunities for them to lead their own learning and explore the materials in the setting. This week we have seen them investigating why a plank was wobbling when placed on two crates (they discovered there was a slight height difference between the crates!), building homes for animals and accessing spooky pasta pieces to make patterns in play dough. We love to observe and extend their free play and we never know quite what direction we’ll be going in next!

Coming up this half term we have a pantomime outing – more information to follow! It will be on a Wednesday but don’t worry if that’s not your child’s usual day in nursery – they will still be able to come. Also, don’t forget your child is invited to come to nursery in a Halloween outfit or costume next Tuesday, as we are are planning some spooky activities and a special afternoon tea. Watch out for the Green Room grown-ups too… we might be looking a bit frightful!

Until next week,

The Green Room Team

A scarecrow, some sticks and special talents!

Leave a comment October 13, 2023 juicenursery

Hello again from Preschool!

Have you spotted the new member of Juice Nursery yet? He wears dungarees, a hat, gloves and – of course – a green preschool t-shirt… That’s right, it’s our scarecrow! What fun we had finding and stuffing his clothes and trying out different ways of getting him to stand up. Families, we need your help – our scarecrow doesn’t have a name yet! Between us, we’ve come up with three options but we’d love you to vote by emailing jen@juicenursery.com with your favourite choice from the following:

• Billy

• Otis

• Sage

We’ll let you know his chosen name next week and in the meantime, you can pose for a photo with him and share it with us using #juicenurseryscarecrow. The children were fascinated with the straw we used so we talked about where it came from and popped some in a tray with the farm animals to encourage their small world role play.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve continued to collect natural materials whilst out and about. Thank you to those families who have sent in some lovely autumnal finds, too! This week, we put leaves, branches, seeds, pine cones and more to good use while creating our own transient art in the style of artist and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy. His land art is really fascinating and prompted the children used some amazing language to describe the colours and textures in his pieces. Did you know he was born in Cheshire?

It’s the perfect time of year to plant bulbs, so green-fingered Jojo set up a lovely planting activity: making a bulb lasagne! The trick is to layer bulbs with different flowering periods in a planter and enjoy them throughout the year as they each bloom in succession. The children enjoyed learning how to use a special planting tool, comparing the different kinds of bulbs and even spotted a juicy earthworm in the soil!

Green Room received some exciting mail last week – a letter from a chicken called Daisy, the star of one of our reading books. She needed advice because the other chicks laughed at her when she said she wanted to fly! The children came up with some lovely ideas about how she could achieve this and then talked about their own goals. Finally, we wrote a reply to Daisy and practised spotting letters from the alphabet. It would be great if you could support this at home by talking to your children about what they’re good at and what they would like to be able to do. Also, model some handwriting for them by ‘thinking out loud’ as you jot down a shopping list or plan for the day. It’s great for them to be exposed to all kinds of texts in real-life situations.

Speaking of goals, talents and special interests, we wondered if any parents or other family members would like to come in and talk to the Preschool children about a particular topic. This could be your job, a religious celebration, a hobby or a pet. We’ve heard someone has snakes at home, so we’re a little nervous…!

Finally, we’re planning a ‘Bring a stick to school’ day and would love you to send one in with your child over the next few days. We look forward to seeing all manner of sticks and can’t wait to put them to good use as wands, lightsabers and parts of a giant sculpture… watch this space!

See you all soon,

The Green Room Team

World Space Week!

Leave a comment October 6, 2023 juicenursery

Firstly, thank you so much to the grandparents who visited on Monday to see their grandchildren in our setting. We loved welcoming you in, showing you around and hearing the feedback that it made your day, week, month and year! We will let you know about our next planned open event so you can come and share some activities and play with us.

Following the popularity of the chalk on last week’s Muddy Morning, we brought the box out with us again on this trip and marvelled at the children’s inventive designs on the cobblestones. It was also a great opportunity to practise some number and letter recognition. We even had some other children who were visiting the park wanting to join in! This is something you could try in the garden too… send us photos of any designs your little street artists create!

This week is World Space Week, much to the delight of our children! For a listening activity, we fastened our seatbelts and took off, making noisy rocket sounds with our voices and various wooden instruments. We practised counting down to the launch and making our sounds louder and quieter.

To practise recognising the letters their names, the children created a rocket by selecting the correct letters and sticking them down by themselves. We also had great fun experimenting with gravity using our own conker comets with tissue paper tails added. We were amazed at how far they flew! Sadly they were too fast for us to catch on camera, but you can see the children enjoying the process of making them below.

We are lucky enough to be following the global initiative Think Equal, which teaches social and emotional wellbeing. As part of the programme, we have a fabulous new set of books and will be using one per week to support our teaching. Our first book is called ‘Me, Myself and I’. During circle times this week, we have begun to encourage the children to think about what they like about themselves and what they are good at. The children found it tricky to put this into words, so we’ll continue this into next week, as it ties in nicely with World Mental Health Day. You can read more about Think Equal at http://www.thinkequal.org.uk

We have some lovely plans for supporting the wellbeing of our children and the community, so check back next week to see what we’ve been up to!

Bye for now,

The Green Room Team