As you may remember, at the end of last week, we flew to China on our magic carpet and came down to land on what looked like some sort of lookout or wall.  The children used their looking eyes and came up with some fantastic suggestions as to where we might have landed…

Luckily, we were able to find out the answer by asking an expert; one of the children in our class has an uncle who used to live in China and he very kindly made a video for us.  He taught us how to say hello in Chinese and how to count to 5. And…he told us we had landed on the Great Wall of China!

You can take a closer look at the Great Wall of China in this National Geographic video:

Of course, the wall inspired much of our building and balancing:

This week was also book week at St. Matthew’s so we took a break from our world travels and immersed ourselves in the whole-school theme of ‘Back to Nature’.  Our focus book was ‘The Lost Words’ by Robert Macfarlane.  As the author explains;

“The book began as a response to the removal of everyday nature words – among them “acorn”, “bluebell”, “kingfisher” and “wren” – from a widely used children’s dictionary, because those words were not being used enough by children to merit inclusion. But The Lost Words then grew to become a much broader protest at the loss of the natural world around us, as well as a celebration of the creatures and plants with which we share our lives, in all their wonderful, characterful glory.” Robert Macfarlane (author).

You can revisit some of the poems (spells) here:

In nursery, we talked about the words we are already familiar with and we were so impressed that the children already knew many of them, including acorn, bluebell, bramble, conker, dandelion and fern!  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the children already know so many nature words given that most days in nursery are spent getting ‘back to nature!’

We decided to create our own book of nature words and quickly got to work exploring the garden to find creatures and plants we could collect or photograph.  Here are some of our beautiful findings…

After the half term, we will finish putting our book together and be sure to share it with you!

Have a wonderful half term everyone and see you back at school on Monday 7th June.

Last week, we landed in Frida Kahlo’s beautiful, colourful garden in Mexico City.  This inspired us, this week, to take our painting outside too.  Unfortunately, the weather in Raynes Park wasn’t quite as sunny and bright as it was in Mexico but, of course, we didn’t mind at all.  In fact, we love it when it starts to rain because muddy puddles have got to be one of our favourite things!

As you may remember, we particularly love to colour mix in the puddles, using sprinkles of powder paint.  However, there was so much rain this week, that the puddles were very muddy indeed and this made it difficult to see the colour changes.

So, instead, we decided to do our colour mixing in the water tray.  We always use the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow) when mixing, so the children can clearly see how to create the secondary colours (orange, green and purple).

image from Wikipedia

We also tried lots of colour mixing with paint and brushes at our outside paint station…

And we even had a go at painting with giant paintbrushes (brushes attached to broom handles!)…

Later, we used an assortment of different sized brushes to create our very own mural in the garden…

Isn’t it beautiful? Unfortunately, it didn’t last long as the wind became so strong in the afternoon, that it blew away!  Luckily, we were able to take a few photos to share with you!

All of this wonderful painting led us to our next story – The Magic Paintbrush by Julia Donaldson and Joel Stewart:

Image from www.amazon.co.uk

This is a charming story about a girl called Shen who receives a magic paintbrush.  The paintbrush can bring the items she paints to life!  You can revisit the story here:

The story of the magic paintbrush is set in China – which is the next stop on Granny’s worldwide adventure!  We were quite reluctant to leave Mexico (and actually asked to extend our stay so we could re-read our Frida story twice more!) but, eventually, we climbed back onto the magic carpet and waved goodbye to Frida and her monkey.

We flew up, up and away westwards once more, over the Pacific Ocean to China.  As we came into land, we could see lots of trees, mountains and what looked like a very long line across the landscape:

We used the orange man to help us land safely and this is what we saw:

We wondered where on earth we could be?

“It’s a bridge with water under”

“It’s a lookout”

“It’s a house”

“It’s a prison” (such a good suggestion – linked to the story we had just read, perhaps?)

“It’s a wall of China!”

What super ideas and guesses Nursery – we were so impressed!

Don’t forget to check back next week, to find out where we have landed…

On Monday morning, the children were amazed and delighted to find rice in the water tray!  Thailand, the country we were visiting, has lots of rice farmers and some of the rice that we eat in our homes here in the UK may have come all the way from Thailand!

The children spent much of the morning, pouring, scooping and sifting the rice in the water to get it nice and soggy!  The next day, we removed the water and used pipettes to add drops of food colouring to the rice – creating the effect of rainbow rice!

“I love rainbow rice!”

Isn’t it beautiful?

Just as we were packing our bags and getting ready to set off on the next part of our adventure, we spotted a herd of elephants, who had become caught in traps!

Luckily, the children found them just in time and carefully freed them using specialised equipment (tweezers!).  We made sure they were all safe in the elephant sanctuary before we climbed back onto our magic carpet.

The next stop on Granny’s journey was Mexico and, to inspire our visit, we decided to learn about a very famous Mexican artist called Frida Kahlo.  We read this delightful book by Isabel Sanchez Vegara which told us about Frida’s life and you can revisit it at home in the video below.

Book cover image from www.amazon.co.uk

When Frida was growing up, she had an accident and hurt her leg so badly that she had to stay in bed for a long time.  She couldn’t watch TV or play games on her ipad.  Can you remember why she couldn’t do these things?  That’s right, because “ipads (and TVs) were only made after the olden days finished” and Frida lived in the olden days.

To help pass the time, Frida started drawing and painting instead and that is how she became a famous artist!  She would look at herself in a mirror and then paint a picture of herself.  We learnt that paintings like these are called self-portraits.

Here’s a photo of Frida and a self-portrait that she painted:

Images from: https://photos.com/featured/frida-kahlo-holding-her-pet-monkey-bettmann.html  and https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frida-kahlos-self-portraits-helped-embrace-flaws

Inspired by Frida’s self-portrait, we decided to paint our own.  First, we took a selfie on the ipad and then looked very carefully at it to help us paint our own self-portraits!  We have just started working on these and will carry on next week.  We are very impressed with the results so far!

We decided to visit Frida’s house in Mexico which is still there today even though Frida is no longer alive.  The house where she lived is now a museum dedicated to her.  So, we entered ‘Blue House, Mexico City’ into our satnav (Google Earth) and waved goodbye to the elephants in Thailand as we headed eastwards once more, up over the gigantic Pacific Ocean to North America.

As we came down to land, we saw lots and lots of houses and trees.  A lot of people live in Mexico City – even more than in London!  We even spotted some swimming pools in some of the gardens!

We decided to take a closer look and, using the little, orange man to guide us, we landed right in the courtyard of Frida’s house.  The walls were painted a beautiful, bright blue and there were trees everywhere!  There were even some words written on the wall in Spanish, telling us that Frida and her husband Diego had lived in the house in the olden days!

We thought the trees in Frida’s courtyard where probably there for her pet spider monkey to swing through!  Did you spot her spider monkey in her photo and self-portrait? Spider monkeys can only be found in Mexico and other countries in South America.  They have a really long tail that they use to help them swing through the trees.

We also read the story of Monkey Puzzle by Julia Donaldson which is all about a little monkey trying to find his mum in the jungle.

Book cover image from www.amazon.co.uk

You can listen to the story again in the video below:

After visiting Frida’s house, we noticed lots of house making within the children’s own play both outside and inside, with the wooden blocks and, of course, in our lovely home corner.

Finally, we took a moment this week to remember what we had learnt about Ramadan and Eid-al-Fitr when we visited Istanbul.  Some of the children in our class celebrated Eid this week and they showed us the lovely clothes they wear to celebrate.  They also taught us how to say ‘Eid Mubarak’ and one of our lovely mums even read us a Curious George story about Ramadan.  Thank you so much!

Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you on Monday!

This week, our travelling adventures continued as we jumped back onto our magic carpet and headed even further east.  We waved goodbye to Istanbul, buckled up our seatbelts and flew up, up and away over Iran and India to northern Thailand.

Miss Chandler has visited Thailand before and she told us all about her trip to visit the elephants who live in a sanctuary there.  We learnt that a sanctuary is a place where elephants can live safely protected from hunters.  She showed us some photos from her trip and told us that she fed the elephants bananas (which they ate whole including the skins) and one of them sprayed her with water from its trunk!

We decided to take a closer look at an elephant sanctuary so we entered ‘elephant nature park thailand’ into our magic carpet navigation system (aka Google Earth) and landed here:

We could see lots of trees, a river and some little huts.  When we came into land, we could see that the little huts were actually big umbrellas and lots of elephants were standing under them to shelter from the sun.  Another elephant was keeping cool in the river!

We then watched a video from the Nature Park to see some close ups of the elephants that live there:

And we read a delightful story by Susan Hellard about a Baby Elephant who gets into all sorts of trouble because she is not very good at listening…

You can revisit the story here:

Fortunately, our listening skills are much better that Ephra’s!  It must be because we play lots of games in Nursery to practise our listening and attention skills.  These skills help us to become confident communicators and form the foundation for the reading and writing skills we will learn in Reception next year.  This week, we focused especially on our body percussion skills: we played pass the clap (where you have to pass a clap all the way around a circle, listening very carefully so you know when it is your turn) and the mirror game (where you sit opposite your partner and listen carefully to the three sounds they make, e.g. clap, clap, stamp – then copy them).  Why not have a go at playing one of these games at home?

We also read the story of Commotion in the Ocean by Giles Andreae.  This is one of our absolute favourites at the moment because many of us are sea creature experts!  You can read this book again at home here:

Thailand is also famous for it’s beautiful beaches and sea-creatures.  Did you know that the world’s largest shark can be found in the waters around Thailand!  It is called a Whale Shark.  Why not see if you can spot it in this video…