Welcome back to the second half of the Spring term in Nursery.  We hope everyone had a lovely, restful half term break.  The children were so keen to dive straight back into their playing & learning and we all enjoyed the sunshine earlier in the week!

The week before half term, we returned to our ‘Out of the Egg’ topic and read two super stories about another animal that hatches out of an egg…

First, we read the story of ‘The Bad-Tempered Ladybird’ (yet another Eric Carle book) which tells the tale of a particularly grumpy ladybird.  Throughout the book, she picks a fight with all the other animals until eventually realising the importance of friendship.  Next, we read the classic Julia Donaldson story ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ which many of the children are already familiar with.  In this book, the ladybird saves the day when two robbers attempt to steal the “fine prize cow”.

We then made some ladybirds of our own which you may well have already ‘spotted’ in the classroom!  The children were given pre-cut shapes (two circles and a heart – which linked nicely to Valentine’s Day!) and then carefully followed the instructions to stick their ladybirds together.  Finally, they were asked to decide how many spots they wanted to stick on their ladybird.  We encouraged the children to make sure they said only one number name for each spot as they counted them onto their ladybirds. Well done Nursery!

The children were quick to link this activity to the stories we had read:

• “Mine is the grumpy ladybird!”
• “Mine is grumpy!”
• “I’ve made the kind-tempered ladybird”
• “Mine is the friendly ladybird”

When we returned after the half-term break, the children discovered this wonderful ‘invitation to play’ that had been set up for them by Mrs M & Mrs W.  I was so impressed by how well they remembered the story and even discovered several of them retelling it through their own maps and their own storytelling words, including lots of positional vocabulary (i.e. under, around, over!).

This week, the children were thrilled to discover that our ‘Out of the Egg’ focus for the next couple of weeks will be dinosaurs!  We have been reading some of the books from the ‘Harry and the Dinosaurs’ series as well as the rather lovely story of ‘A Dinosaur Called Tiny’ which I would highly recommend.

Here’s a youtube clip of the story – you might like to turn the sound off and read it yourself…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYyv_F8vuEU

Inspired by Tiny, who hatches out of an egg at the beginning of the story, we decided to make our very own dinosaur eggs!  We worked together to tear up strips of newspaper, covered them in watery-glue and then placed them very carefully over some balloons.

Once the sticky glue had dried, we were able to paint the eggs.  We used yellow, blue and red paint to give the children yet another opportunity to explore colour mixing.

When you are next in the classroom, do take a moment to see if you can find our dinosaur nest.  Of course, they are not real eggs, so please don’t worry! We are just using our imaginations!! 😉

I wonder how long they will take to hatch….?