Today on our welly walk in the nature reserve, we made music! Firstly, we discovered that all our classroom instruments had been hidden all over the woods. We set off exploring and all managed to find an instrument to play. The children then had lots of fun playing their instruments and singing some of our favourite songs. They also enjoyed marching round while playing their instruments in the marching band. 
Following this, the children were given a challenge to collect sticks from the nature reserve and use these to make music in their own way as they were exploring. The children found out that banging sticks on different surfaces made different kinds of sounds and they loved running their sticks along the metal fence. 

As the little red hen in our story of the week bakes her own bread, today we have baked bread in nursery. Over the course of the week, the children have learnt about the process of planting a wheat seed, caring for it and waiting for it to grow, cutting the wheat, threshing the wheat and then taking it to the mill to be ground into flour.
Today they have learnt how to mix the flour with water to make a dough and then how to knead and shape the dough before waiting for it to rise. The children really developed their motor skills as they stretched, rolled, squashed and pushed their dough before shaping it into a bread roll. We then had to leave it in a warm place and wait for it to rise. The children were amazed that it was much bigger than when they left it! Finally we baked the bread in the oven and left it to cool for home time. I hope you enjoyed eating your tasty bread. It certainly smelt delicious! 

Our new book of the week is The Little Red Hen. Today we have read the story and the children have used their creative skills to make their own Little Red Hen stick puppet. We hope they will be able to use this to help them to act out the story. 
As Little Red Hen lives on a farm, we have been using different materials to build our own farm and have added different animals to it. We have also been talking about friendship and how to be a good friend as the animals in the story did not help their friend, the hen. The children in nursery have been playing together and sharing with their friends which is always lovely to see. 

Today we all made our own pig biscuit to take home and enjoy. We learnt how to mix icing sugar, water and food colouring to make icing and then used our fine motor skills to carefully spread it onto a biscuit. Finally we carefully sprinkled and placed different toppings in our own design to make our pig. I hope you enjoyed eating them. 

The children have been developing their box modelling skills by making houses like the three pigs from our story. The children selected their own materials and then used tape and glue to fasten them together in appropriate ways. A lot of skills were practised and developed while making these houses. 

In our group times this week we have been learning about shapes and linking this to the shapes needed to build a house. Some of the children have been building using small wooden blocks and talking about their models while spotting shapes in them. Others have been investigating how to arrange lollipop sticks to create different shapes. We have been using words such as circle, triangle, rectangle, square, oval, hexagon, curved, round, straight, sides and corners. 

Today for a focused activity, we all made our own pig mask using a paper plate and a lollipop stick. Some of us even managed to cut out our own eye holes! Once we had made them, we practised saying the repeated phrase from the story- "Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin. I will NOT let you in!" 

Our new book of the week is the traditional story of The Three Little Pigs. We began today by reading the story together and the children tried hard to join in with the repeated phrases. 
Our provision activities so far have included: building houses using different construction materials, using small world figures and puppets to re-tell the story, drawing and writing about the story as well as investigating  straw and sticks using our senses. We have talked about the suitability of materials to build houses and the reasons why the straw and stick houses blew down so easily. 

Today we have baked gingerbread men to link in with our book of the week. Some children had a go at weighing and mixing the ingredients to make the dough. Then all the children rolled and cut out their own gingerbread man and decorated it in their own way. I hope they tasted nice and they didn't run away like the one in the story did! 

This week in nursery we are basing our learning around the story of
The Gingerbread Man. Today the children have been telling the story using puppets and pretending to bake their own gingerbread men in our role play area. We have got gingerbread play dough with different sized gingerbread man cutters in our dough area. The children have also been using different mark making and collage materials to create their own gingerbread character.