Everyday, just before home-time, the children settle down on the carpet for story-time.  It is always one of their favourite parts of the morning.  This week, our stories were decidedly animal-themed…

On Monday, we read a delightful, old favourite; the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  As you will probably know, the story begins when a tiny (“and very hungry”) caterpillar pops out of an egg.  This is one of the key texts for our topic this term (‘Out of the Egg’) and the children have been busy working together to create their very own “big, fat caterpillar” for our entrance area.  We will be continuing to add the finishing touches to our display board next week but do look out for our caterpillar at drop off – the children are thrilled with their work and have been paying great attention to detail, ensuring their caterpillar looks like the version in the story.

Exploring colour mixing to make green paint for the caterpillar’s body…

You can watch a particularly lovely animated version of the story here:

On Tuesday,  we read another familiar story that links nicely with our topic; Owl Babies.  We always make a point of reading this story when we have new children starting in nursery as they often find its familiarity and central message that ‘mummy will come back’ particularly reassuring.  The children know the story so well that many have been retelling the story for themselves.

The children have also been enjoying looking after the owl family that have been visiting this week and making sure that the owl babies (Sarah, Percy and Bill) find their way back to their mummy – especially at tidy-up time!

Here’s another lovely animation for you to share at home if you wish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPQRiSTYFHo

On Wednesday we read the story ‘Slowly, Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth’ which is another story by Eric Carle (the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar).  This story is full of interesting, unusual animals and the children were particularly taken with the final page which illustrates all the different animals in the book. You can hear the story in full here:

And here’s the final page – isn’t it lovely?

As the children had so many question about these animals, we decided to do a bit of googling and see if we could find any videos of what these animals actually look like in real life.  We were all fascinated by a video of a stripey baby tapir, a flying snake and an anteater eating ants with its long, black tongue!  You can see these videos by clicking on the links below:

Baby tapir: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/wild/ultimate-animal-countdown/00000144-1520-dcf1-a954-55f97abe0000

Flying snakes: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/wild/ultimate-animal-countdown/00000144-1520-dcf1-a954-55f97abe0000

Anteater: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000144-0a1e-d3cb-a96c-7b1f70fb0000

Do let us know if you happen to do anymore animal research at home! Would love to find out more about these animals.  I wonder which ones hatch out of eggs?

On (a particularly chilly) Thursday, we carried on exploring our interest in different animals with yet another Eric Carle book; ‘Polar Bear, Polar Bear, what do you hear’?

This story features even more beautifully illustrated animals.  There are three animals in the story that hatch from eggs – do you think you know which ones they are?

We finished the week, on Friday with the story ‘Ow’! by Michael Rosen & Jonathan Langley which tells the tale of how Piggy the Piglet finds himself with a prickly problem and works his way around the farmyard asking all the different farm animals for help.

What a very busy week of stories!  I wonder what you will read on Saturday and on Sunday? 😊

We have had such a super start to the Spring Term in nursery!  Our older children have impressed us all by settling back into the classroom quickly and happily.  They have also been doing a wonderful job of looking after the 8 new children who have joined us over the course of this week.  We are very proud of how thoughtful they have been in welcoming the new children and showing them what happens during our mornings at nursery.

Our new children have also been impressing us with how well they have settled into their new classroom and how brave they have been when saying goodbye to their mummies and daddies.  We would like to wish all of our new families a very warm welcome to our nursery and we hope you are already beginning to feel part of the St. Matthew’s community.

This term, our topic will be ‘Out of the Egg’.  We will be reading lots of stories about animals and focusing particularly on those animals that hatch out of eggs.  I will shortly be sending home our Spring Term edition of Nursery News which will provide more information about the topic and give you some ideas of activities you might like to try at home.

This week, we read the classic story of ‘Dear Zoo’ by Rod Campbell which is always worth a re-read.  It is a lift-the-flap book which the children find particularly engaging!

You can watch the story of Dear Zoo being retold here in this youtube clip:

And here are some of the wonderful ‘invitations to play’ (as I like to call them) which have been set up this week by Mrs W & Mrs M…

Despite the chilly weather, many of the children are still keen to race outside once we open the classroom doors.  So please do remember to send in hats and gloves, particularly as it looks like this cold weather will continue – thank you!