2-3: The Discovery Hub

This week we have continued exploring the festive season. Thank you for sharing the wonderful photos of your home experiences, the children have loved looking at them and sharing the events such as seeing Santa and the reindeers.

Transitions from the Den and to the Investigation Hub have continued across the week and it has been lovely to build new relationships with the children and for the children to meet new staff.

On Wednesday, we had a lovely day for Christmas jumper and dinner day. The children were very excited to show each other their festive clothing. It was lovely to join the children during dinner as we listened to Christmas music, thank you to Allison and Elaine for our lovely dinner.

Playing and Exploring

The children have been exploring creating a hat for our party next week. We explored adding stickers to the hats, where the children were labelling the items such as snowman, Santa, bauble, Christmas tree.

While exploring in the environment the children have shown an interest with the Christmas shape cutters in the area. The children have explored using the rolling pins to roll out the dough before pressing the shapes into the dough.

Looking at some of our tree decorations, we explored grouping decorations together by colour. The children labelled the colour of the decorations and then placed them into the baskets which were the same colour. During this activity, some of the children used language to describe the items such as “big bauble” or “small bauble”.

In the garden, the children have enjoyed watching and following the bubbles as the wind blew them away. Some of the children commented “oh…up…up…come down” and “more bubbles”. We have continued exploring mark making in the garden as we used chalk to create marks on the cardboard boxes. This week there has been many trains passing and the children have shown excitement as they hear the horn and watch the trains going past the nursery. We have been exploring climbing up the peekaboo tower, talking how to keep safe holding the rails. The children enjoyed looking through the colour windows to find their friends.

Communication and Language

We had a lovely visit from Joanne from Gateshead Library this week. She shared how she works in the library working with lots of books. She shared a few Christmas stories with the children and they were very engaged with the books. The children especially enjoyed when the bauble rolled in the snow and turned into a snowball. We were very grateful that the children have all been given a book pack, if your child has not received theirs yet please see a member of staff. 

Parents as Partners

We have a very busy week next week in the lead up to the holidays.

·‘The Clumsiest Elf’ Show’ – The show will be held at Bensham Grove Community Centre at 2:20-3:05pm on Monday 15th December.

·Christmas Party – On Tuesday we will be having our Christmas Party with the children during their sessions.

·Christmas Singalong – Wednesday 17th December 11:30am and 3:15pm.

·Movie day – Friday 19th December

Our last day in Nursery before the Christmas Holidays will be Friday 19th December. Nursery will be closed over the holidays and we will reopen on Tuesday 6th January.

Have a lovely weekend!

The Nursery Team