Our number song of the week is "5 Little Pumpkins." At group time, some children held up numbered pumpkins and we ordered them from 1 to 5. The children all showed 5 on their fingers and then took one away each time as one was bought in the song. We talked about taking one away and finding one less and then showed how many were left on our fingers. On the Maths table, we have resources to help us sing this song and explore our learning independently with our friends. 
Here are the words to the song if you would like to sing it with your child at home. It is sung to the tune of 5 currant buns.

5 little pumpkins in a vegetable shop,
Round and orange with a circle on the top.
Along came .............. with some money one day,
Bought an orange pumpkin and took it away. 

As part of our learning about Halloween, we have been talking about pumpkins this week. At group time, we passed a pumpkin around the circle and everyone had a chance to hold it and talk about it. The children described the pumpkin using words such as orange, big, round, heavy, cold and bumpy. We then talked about what they thought might be inside it before we opened it and had a look. The children were amazed to find it was full of seeds! 
We then worked together to scoop out the middle and this was such a great sensory experience. The children described it using words such as sticky, slimy, wet and slippy. 
Once all the middle had been scooped out, we decided together on which shapes to cut out for the features and then added a light inside. 
There was such a lot of learning in this activity and it was lots of fun too!

This week we are theming our learning around Halloween, Our book of the week is Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and we will be reading the book and encouraging the children to join in with the repeated phrases. We have enhanced our home corner with resources for the children to role play a Halloween party. In the water area, there is a challenge to create a potion or a spell for a witch and we have green cornflour gloop to create witches slime in our sensory tray. We have orange dough and materials to add to encourage the children to create pumpkins. In the creative area this week, we will be decorating pumpkins by sticking on different shapes and there are lots of opportunities for writing and drawing about Halloween too. 
Here are some photos of us engaged in our provision so far this week. We are learning to share and take turns with the resources and talk to our friends as we play. 

On our welly walk today, we made leaf crowns by sticking leaves onto a card strip. We had a challenge to try to collect as many leaves of different colours and shapes as we could. There was lots of discussion about the shapes and colours as we chose our leaves. Once they were complete, the children wore their leaf crowns and engaged in some brilliant role play which involved kings, queens, princes and princesses. We have some very imaginative children in our nursery! 

To link with our theme of harvest time, we printed with fruit and vegetables. Firstly, we dipped our fruit or vegetable into paint and then carefully pressed it onto our paper to print. This was great for developing our fine motor skills as it was quite tricky to pick up the fruit or veg and we also had to use our muscles to apply enough pressure to get a good print. 

We are developing our outdoor learning area at the moment so today we decided to plant some flowers in our growing bed. We worked together with our gardening tools to dig over the bed and dig out the weeds. Then we planted some daffodil bulbs which will flower in the Spring. After that we carefully dug holes and then planted lots of Autumn flowers to make our garden colourful. While we were gardening there was lots of talk and we used words such as: bulb, plant, flower, leaf, petal, roots, careful, trowel, fork, spade. We also talked about the names of the different plants- pansies, primroses and bellis. 
We hope you like our colourful garden. Now we are going to learn to take care of the plants and watch them grow. 

This week in nursery, we are learning about Harvest time. Our book of the week is The Little Red Hen and we will be reading lots of different versions of the story and acting it out with our friends. 
We have a fruit and vegetable shop in our role play area so the children can role play being the customer and shopkeeper as they learn to share and take turns. 
Our Maths song of the week is "Way up High in an Apple Tree" and we will be learning to show amounts on our fingers and find one less as an apple falls from the tree. 
Here are some photos of us engaged in our continuous provision so far this week- the fruit and vegetable shop has been very popular so far! 
​

In nursery we love making music and there is so much learning involved! Today we took our music into the nature reserve on our welly walk. When we arrived, we discovered that our musical instruments had been hidden all over the area- under the trees, behind the bushes and in-between things. The children had a minute to run around and find an instrument, then bring it back to the shelter to play. We played our instruments fast and slow, loud and quiet and we learnt to play and stop to a signal in our play and stop song. Then we went marching around playing our instruments as we sang different songs including "The Grand Old Duke of York." Finally we sat together and the children chose their favourite songs for us to sing and play to. 

Today for snack the children enjoyed toast. The children learnt how to use a knife safely to spread butter or jam onto their toast. We then cut the toast into different shapes- a perfect opportunity to link snack time to our theme of the week. Here are some photos of the children making and then eating their own toast. See if your child can remember what shape they chose. 

Today was National Poetry Day and in nursery we focused on rhymes. For our group time, we sang and acted out lots of different nursery rhymes together. We used our rhyme puppets and a nursery rhyme book to help us to choose which rhymes we would sing. 
Our focus rhyme for this half term is Humpty Dumpty and the children are getting really good at singing this all the way through now.