Christmas has well and truly arrived this week. 

The children have helped to decorate the Nursery and we now have several trees.  Christmas decorations, cards and calendars are now in full production mode.  Paper chains, festive bunting and Christmas themed colouring are now throughout the Nursery for all to see. 

Glitter, glitter everywhere. 

We have had a great time with the tuff trays using our “Going on a Bear Hunt” story.  Flour has been a swirling, whirling snowstorm, black jelly was oozing mud and hay for the long wavy grass.  Mr Parsons almost got stuck in the mud!  We have acted out the story using small world too

One of the highlights of the week was a whole morning dedicated to Happy Land.  The whole Nursery became a town, with a farm, castle, fire station, school, railway station, boot house, tree house and so much more.  There were many different stories being played out and it was wonderful to hear the conversations between the children. 

We have continued to practice our Christmas performance songs – Little Donkey and Away in a Manger.  This never ceases to get everyone in the Christmas spirit to hear the children’s voices.

The Christmas Nativity characters have been used to introduce the Christmas story to the children and we have talked about why we give and receive presents, why Mary went on the donkey – because it was a long journey and how we look after a baby.  We have used picture cards to retell the story, cut up catalogues to cut out pictures of what we might give to the new baby Jesus and looked after the dolls.  We used a range of small world resources to re tell the story. 

Our Personal Development story has been “Love Makes a Family.”  This has been linked to the Nativity story and as the basis for talking about our own family too.  This has been extended to investigate size- who is the biggest in your family?  Further to this, we have talked about oral health.  How can we keep our teeth healthy?  The children played a tooth brushing game and made the teeth very sparkly clean in addition to cleaning the dolls teeth for them.

As part of our Unlocking Letters and Sounds learning, we have investigated Musical instruments.  The sounds they make and playing Guess the Instrument games.  We continue to practice name recognition at many different opportunities and are so pleased with how the children are making such great progress with this. 

We have used the white board to practice number recognition 1-5 and to count how many in a group.  Counted Kings, baubles, jumps, multi links and gems. 

The Christmas Fun will continue next week and we can’t wait!