It has been a fun filled and busy end of term in Nursery. The children decorated 'nature eggs' in our outside area, collecting grass, sticks, daisies and leaves to decorate their eggs. They also made Easter cards, tearing yellow tissue paper to make their Easter chick. The children rounded off the term by working together to make Easter nest cakes, melting chocolate and mixing in rice crispies. Yummy!

Yesterday we had a lovely day in Nursery learning about Ramadan and Eid. We were very lucky to have two parents and one of our lunchtime supervisors come in to talk to the children about what our Muslim families do during Ramadan and how they celebrate Eid. We learned:

• That Ramadan lasts a month and starts with a new moon. We looked at cycles of the moon and enjoyed trying to recreate them with jaffa cakes!
• During Ramadan, Muslim adults and older children don't eat or drink between sunrise and sunset to help them understand how people who don't have enough food must feel and to be grateful for the food they have. We learned that Muslim people often break their fast by eating dates, and tried some ourselves!
• Muslim people think a lot about how to do good deeds during Ramadan. We thought about ways that we could be kind to our friends and other people.
• At the end of Ramadan is the celebration of Eid al-Fitr where Muslim families come together to celebrate, wear special clothes, eat lots of lovely food and give each other presents.

Ramadan Mubarak to all our families celebrating!

Last week in Nursery, we had lots of fun learning all about the Lunar New Year, and the Chinese traditions and customs of the festival. We learnt about the lucky colour red and why manadrin oranges and red envelopes are exchanged over the celebrations. In small groups, the children learnt how to make a dragon puppet - folding strips of card and using lollipop sticks. We listened to dragon dance music and banged on drums and cymbals's creating our very own dragon dance. A great way to welcome in the year of the dragon!

This week in Nursery we have been practising sharing fairly. We read the story 'The Last Marshmallow' by Grace Lin, which is about what two children did when they had three marshmallows to share. Then we practised sharing gem 'sweets' out, saying "One for you, one for me." We talked about what we could do if there is one left over. The children's ideas included:

• break it in half and share it
• put that one away
• get another one
• give that one to your teacher!

What fantastic ideas! This would be a brilliant thing to practise at home. The sign for 'fair' that we used to support this learning can be found here: https://www.signbsl.com/sign/fair and we used the third sign along!

The children had so much fun during Pyjama Day in Nursery! We started the week by reading the story, 'Pip and Posy. The Bedtime Frog' and we enjoyed role playing the story in our home corner. We talked about any toys or bedtime routines that are important to our children and we enjoyed a delicious hot chocolate treat to finish the week during circle time!

This week in Nursery, we have revisited one of our favourite stories, "Where's Lenny?" We retold the story using pictures and actions, and then we acted out parts of the story, including making our very own jam on toast! The children did a great job at carefully spreading the butter and scooping out the sweet smelling jam. Finally, they cut the toast into two equal parts and enjoyed sharing a yummy snack with a friend.

This week in Nursery we have been learning about repeating patterns. We have practised making our own patterns using a variety of resources around the classroom, including with unifix cubes, magnetic tiles, natural resources and even with dance moves! For a little extra challenge we have also been trying to spot mistakes in patterns that our teachers have made, they couldn't trick us!

Recently in Nursery our children have been showing us what confident mathematicians they are. We have been looking closely at small amounts of objects and talking about what we notice, for example the child in the top right picture told us, "It's three! I see a one, and a one... and another one!" While the child in the bottom right played around with arrangements of numicon pieces for a long time before telling us, "two and two and two and one is seven... and six and one is seven too!" What brilliant maths skills for children of just three and four years old! Developing a good understanding of how numbers are made up is a huge part of maths in the early years, and will help our children to solve maths problems with confidence as they get older. Look out for our maths workshop in the New Year to learn more about how we teach maths skills in Nursery and Reception!