The staff have noticed that during our free flow choosing time...
Children have been hard at work building castles and caves in the construction area.
Aliens have landed in the nursery! Towards the end of the week children were pretending to be astronauts- flying to the moon and visiting aliens.
Some children have been observing the foggy sky, leading to conversations about other colours they have seen during sunrise and sun set. Children have chosen to paint the sky looking closely at the blend of colours.
Children are no longer finding the large nuts and bolts a challenge.

So the staff have...
Adults have added images of real and fairy tale castles to inspire the children's structures. Following the interest in the flags in the images, we have also added the tools and equipment needed to make their own flags- fantastic for developing scissor skills!
We have also added material and pegs to the construction area for children to create their own caves and dark dens. Pinching pegs is a great way to strengthen the finger muscles used to hold a pen in the correct grip.
Staff have made Papier-mâché space helmets and joined children as they have acted out the role. Adults have encouraged children to design, talk about and paint their own aliens, whilst modelling descriptive language. We have listened as children have shared their existing knowledge of space and answered any space-related questions as they have arisen. Some children wanted to make their own space helmets but unfortunately we have run out of cardboard boxes. We would really appreciate any spare medium sized cardboard boxes!
Children have selected the images that they would like to paint. Staff have limited the paint to primary colours and demonstrated how to mix in order to create new colours or shades. Adults have introduced vocabulary such as light, dark, blend, pastel and bright.
To increase the difficulty, we have swapped them to small nuts and bolt which have to be fastened to a board with a spanner. This will help to improve the children's hand-eye coordination and precision, as well as working with tools.

Our story of the week was...
Rhyming Rabbit by Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks.
Rhyming Rabbit loves to make up entertaining poems, inspired by everything he sees, but the other rabbits don’t appreciate his talent for rhyme until he meets a poetic sheep! Our children have used this story to inspire their own rhymes and poems, written within their groups.

During our group times...
Rhyming continues to be of focus during our group activities. Children have been reading a selection of rhyming stories during their library sessions and trying to thing of their own rhyming string (e.g dog, log, frog, nog).
Some children have taken part in physical literacy groups aimed to strengthen their gross motor muscles (such as shoulders, elbows and neck). This will help to establish the control and stability needed for early writing.
Other children have been developing their phase one phonics skills by looking at rhythm and beat, using their body as a percussion instrument.
This week Melissa and Rebecca introduced our next letter and sound- 'a'. To help us to remember this letter we can imagine an apple on it's side. During our group time we met an ant on an apple!
We have also continued with our alien themed maths groups to practice their counting skills and deepen their understanding about number.