Today we enjoyed making chocolate rice crispy buns for our baking activity. We recalled how to melt chocolate from last week and then we used our motor skills to carefully mix and stir the chocolate with the rice crispies. Finally we carefully spooned it into a bun case and left it to set for home time. 

Our investigation tray this week is full of the Autumn treasure we found on our welly walk. The children have enjoyed looking carefully at the collection through magnifying glasses and feeling it with their fingers. They have been describing it using words such as spiky, prickly, sharp, hard and soft. 

This week the focus for our learning is the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. Learning nursery rhymes is great for early reading and phonics development. Today we enjoyed singing the rhyme loudly and quietly as well as with musical instruments. 
Here are some photos of us engaged in our Humpty Dumpty themed continuous provision so far this week. 

Today was our first Feel Good Friday of this school year. All the children were invited to wear their sporty clothes and we did lots of moving around to keep us fit. We really enjoyed our ribbon dancing! First we practised lots of moves with our ribbon including circles, lines up and down and across, rainbows, swirls etc. We then put on a piece of music and the children danced and moved their ribbon in different ways, This activity is fantastic for developing those gross motor skills. 

It was a perfect Autumn day for a welly walk today! We all put our wellies on and went exploring in the nature reserve. We talked about signs of Autumn and the children collected interesting things to take back to nursery. We found lots of leaves, elder cones and chestnuts in their spiky cases. The children noticed that the leaves were all different colours and they had a challenge to find as many different coloured leaves as they could. 
Next week we are going to add our Autumn treasure to our investigation tray in nursery so we can explore it using our magnifying glasses. 

For our baking activity today, we melted chocolate and then used it to decorate our own biscuit. There was lots of Science learning in this activity. Firstly the children noticed that the chocolate was hard and we talked about how to get it to spread onto the biscuit. Some children knew we needed to melt it and suggested putting it in the microwave- very clever! Once the chocolate was melted, the children used their fine motor skills to carefully pour and then spread it onto their biscuit. They then used their pincer movement to carefully pick up small toppings and sprinkle them onto the chocolate. The children noticed that by home time, the chocolate had dried and gone hard again,. I hope you enjoyed eating your biscuits! 

Numberblocks are great for helping us to develop our understanding of numbers and counting. Today we enjoyed building with numberblocks at group time. We learnt how to fasten them together and developed our counting skills as we counted how many we had in our tower. We then compared the size of our towers using words such as big, biggest, tall, taller, short, shorter. 

Today we further developed our painting skills outside by painting a large picture of one of our friends. We learnt to work together as well as develop our painting skills. Firstly, one child lay down on a large sheet of paper and another child carefully drew around their outline. Then the children painted the outline to make a picture of the child. There was lots of talk about parts of the body and colours during this activity. 

At our group time today, we all had a go at bead threading. Look at the concentration on our faces as we carefully threaded our beads onto the lace! 
Whilst we were engrossed in this activity, there was lots of Maths language as we talked about how many beads were on our string and compared them to our friend's. Super job Shooting Stars! 
The bead threading was then added to our continuous provision and lots of children chose to have a go independently. 

Today we developed our mark making skills as we painted on a large scale outside. The children explored painting circles, lines, letters from their names, people and zig zag patterns as well as lots more. We talked about how to hold the brush and it was a perfect opportunity for the children to build their motor skills. 
Our super painting is now on display in nursery for everyone to admire!