January 2, 2023
Welcome back to nursery, everyone! After a lovely Christmas break, our focus for this term is on learning about independence and self-care skills. We have been working hard on using cutlery independently. At dinnertime, we are trying to hold our food in place with our forks while we cut it with a knife. This is very tricky but we are so proud of ourselves when we do it. We have also focused on putting our coats on by ourselves. We even help each other by telling our friends how to do it when they get stuck. Working together makes tricky things a lot easier. To work on our personal, social and emotional development we have been doing lots of turn-taking and learning how to share with each other.
Our first focus story this term has been “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. We have learnt positional language such as “under” and “over”. For this story, we built our own bridge with soft play resources and we took turns walking over it. Some of us had a go at hiding under it too. The children took inspiration from our group times to use props to retell the story. Everybody wanted to join in: We wanted to listen and to have a go. We have also been really good at using the phrases from the story.
We are now focusing on the story “The Enormous Turnip”. We are learning to ask others for help when we need it and to cooperate with each other. We have been discussing how we can achieve great things if we all work together. For this story, we have been practicing the Makaton signs “again”, “grow” and “help”. At group time, we looked at real vegetables and discussed what they taste like, as well as their size, weight and shape. We enjoyed having the opportunity to draw the vegetables afterwards. We had to think about what colours we could use and what shapes we could draw. For example, we made small yellow marks to draw sweetcorn and bigger circles to draw potatoes. In our role-play area, we have been pretending to be shopkeepers and filling our baskets and trolleys with fruit and vegetables.
At singing time, we are learning to wait for our turn to choose a song from our singing box. We are also getting so good at singing and we are joining in with the words and the Makaton signs to our favourite songs. This term we are focusing on different number rhymes. We have really enjoyed “Five Little Peas”. Some of us are using our fingers to count how many peas are left and others can recognise how many peas we have just by looking at them.
We are so proud of all the children in the Transition Room and we are excited to continue to learn together this term.
