There was great excitement in Nursery this week as our dinosaur eggs finally started to hatch!  At the start of the week, we noticed some of the shell had started to fall away from one of the eggs.  We quickly grabbed some torches and took a peek inside…slowly but surely, the baby dinosaur began to emerge from the egg!

The children used their super observational skills to work out which sort of dinosaur had started to hatch.  We looked carefully at 4 pictures of different dinosaurs; a Diplodocus with a long “giraffe” neck, an Ankylosaurus with a spiky back and a club tail, a Velociraptor with “little hands like T-Rex” and a Stegosaurus with large spikes all along its back.

Almost straightaway we could see that this baby had a long neck and no spikes, so we knew it must be a Diplodocus!  Later that morning, a second egg began to hatch.  This time, the children were quick to notice the baby had big spikes all along its back, so they decided it must be a Stegosaurus!  Welcome to the world baby dinosaurs and well done Nursery – what super imaginations you have! 😉

We have been using our fingers to work out how many eggs have not yet hatched.  We had 4 eggs in our nest to start with and 2 eggs have now hatched.  Can you remember the answer?

During story-time this week, we read the delightful story of a bird called ‘Peely Wally’ (thank you to one of our lovely mums for the recommendation!) whose freshly laid egg rolls away on an adventure.  Thankfully, all’s well that ends well and, at the end of the story, the baby bird hatches out of the egg.

The children were very quick to notice that the baby bird’s feathers were the same as the colours and spots on the outside of its egg, which led to an interesting conversation about what Peely Wally’s own egg might have looked like;

• “red, with a little bit of orange”
• “I think red and blue and green”
• “maybe red and black and white”

The following day, we read the non-fiction book ‘An Egg is Quiet” which is full of beautiful illustrations of different eggs; from enormous ostrich eggs to tiny hummingbird eggs.  We even found out that a particular type of dogfish (shark) begins its life in a leathery egg-case!

You can see the book and its wonderful illustrations in this youtube clip – you might like to turn the sound off and read through it yourself:

Inspired by these books and the incredible assortment of eggs in the natural world, we then had a go at painting our own eggs.  We thought carefully about the different colours and patterns we could use and what sort of creature might be inside the egg.

Several weeks ago, we noticed a little robin would often come and sit outside the nursery door during our snack-time – it was most likely waiting for the crumbs that we shake off our picnic blankets once snack-time is finished!  We haven’t seen the little bird this week and we wondered why this might be…we decided the robin had most likely gone off to find food elsewhere.  We decided to make some bird feeders to try and encourage it to come back and visit.

• First, we stood back and watched carefully as the lard was melted in a saucepan.
• Next, we mixed the melted lard with some bird seed.
• Then, we scoop the mixture into a yoghurt pot and added ribbon so we would be able to hang up our bird feeders.
• Finally, we put the yoghurt pots in the fridge to re-harden the lard.

Once the lard had hardened again, we took our bird feeders out into the garden and hung them up in the trees.  It really wasn’t the best week to hang the feeders up, as it has been so windy!  But we’re hoping the wind will settle down next week and, if we’re lucky, we might just spot a feathered friend or two enjoying a tasty snack!