Midweek hello!

Hi everyone.  Hope you're all having a lovely holiday with your children! 

Diggers and building

The children played with the toy diggers, trucks and dumpers today.  We provided the wooden blocks for the children to transport and build and later brought in a basket of conkers, which they incorporated into their play.  We also had to work bench out with all the tools.  What a busy day!

Hope you all have a lovely holiday with your children next week and we'll see some of you on Friday!

Cars down a ramp!

The children were playing with the toy cars this afternoon and started to roll them down a lid, belonging to a small box.  To extend their learning we provided them with a long length of guttering, which they used to push the cars down.  We explored how we could make the cars go faster or slower, by lifting or lowering the guttering. 

Chris took a great photo of them all but unfortunately I've managed to delete it somehow.  Sorry......

Outdoor play and fruit salad again

We spent a lot of time outdoors today.  The children played with the stones, transporting them in trolleys etc, and they played in the cars and trucks, giving each other a ride. 

Later, the children made their own fruit salads again.  This time I remembered the clementines! 

Fruit salad

The children made their own fruit salad today.  We gave them various pieces of fruit, including melon, strawberries, grapes and apples from our own apple tree, and they chose what they wanted to go into their fruit salad.  The children then used knives to cut their fruit into pieces.  They ate their own fruit salad for their morning snack and enjoyed every mouthful!

Painting autumn leaves

We collected some leaves from our garden and talked about the colours.  The children decided what colour paints we would need to paint a picture of the leaves and then painted their own picture, using the various colours. 

Duck pond and autumn trees

We went to the duck pond this morning to feed the ducks.  We looked again for signs of autumn - there were lots of leaves on the floor today.

When we got back, we made some autumn tree pictures, using handprints for the branches and autumn-coloured foam leaves.  The children really enjoyed creating their pictures and couldn't wait to take them home.  

Fire engines and firefighters!

The children are really enjoying playing with some new 'Fireman Sam' engines we bought at the weekend.  They've had all the fire engines out and have been building houses and fire stations out of wooden blocks.  We got out the dressing up clothes today and they wore the firefighters helmets and role-played, using the tent as a house on fire!

Happy birthday Charlotte

Just to wish our very special daughter a happy 17th birthday today!  With lots of love xxxxxxxx

Menu, week beginning 4th October 2010

Monday - Corned beef hash
Tuesday - Shepherds Pie
Wednesday - Cheesy turkey and ham pasta with vegetables
Thursday - Chicken curry and rice
Friday - Fish fingers, wedges, beans

Autumn leaf pictures and lots of 'problem solving, reasoning and numeracy'

The children created an autumn leaf picture from the leaves we collected at the duck pond last week.  We also used some leaves from a tree in our garden which has some lovely autumn colour.  We talked about autumn and what colours the leaves change to.  We discovered that some are red, yellow, brown and even pink. 

Later this morning, we got out lots of items for sorting, including a tray full of shells, lots of lids, some different-coloured gingerbread men and lots of pairs of socks.  The children played for a long time with the various items, counting, sorting, classifying, according to size and colour, and matching patterns.  

Menu, week beginning 27.9.10

Monday - Sausage, mash and green beans
Tuesday - Chicken, pasta in tomato/cheese sauce, peas
Wednesday - Spaghetti bolognaise
Thursday - Fish pie/fish cakes with broccoli and cauliflower
Friday - Chicken casserole and boiled rice

Duck pond yesterday

Hi, I didn't get chance to write last night - we were at Wigan watching PNE lose against them! 

We went to the duck pond yesterday.  The children ran around and we fed the ducks, who were all quite hungry!  We were also looking for changes in the leaves and collected some leaves to make a picture.  We intended to make them today, but we'd had a 'glue' accident!  We'll save them and make one next week instead, when we've had chance to buy some more PVA glue. 

We found some toadstools at the duck pond and we took the chance to remind the children that, although they look like mushrooms, they must never eat them because they will make their tummies poorly. 

Outdoor nature

We welcomed Kaiden-Lee into our setting today.  He's been a really happy little boy and the other children have been making him laugh.

I also played a game, called 'Bag of bits', which is a bag full of various items (can be anything you want) used to encourage thinking and communication in the children. 

The children had fun in the garden looking for signs of autumn.  We found some acorns, ripe rowan berries and saw that our apples were nearly ready for picking! 

Menu, week beginning 20th September

Monday - Chicken fried rice
Tuesday - Pasta bolognaise
Wednesday - Roast ham dinner
Thursday - Home made pizza
Friday - Beef casserole and mashed potato

Madhatters and blocks

We went to Madhatters this morning and again, the children enjoyed running around and playing on the equipment. 

We've also played with the plastic blocks today, making towers and 'boats', as well as recognising and classifying them into colours. 

Hope you all have a great weekend!  We're off to watch PNE probably get beaten by Norwich tomorrow!

Yesterday and today!

Sorry, I didn't get time to write the blog last night.  We spent a lot of time doing jigsaws yesterday, which is one of Adam's favourite activities. 

After our tea-time snack, the children created a masterpiece for the playroom wall, using a long piece of wallpaper!



Today, following on from the water painting last week, the children painted stones.  They really enjoyed mixing the paint colours and were quite excited about what colours the paints would make.  We will do another activity, perhaps on paper, where they can mix colours to experiment.  They have taken their stones home tonight - maybe you could use them as paperweights???





New page on potty training

Please have a look at the new page we've created advising about 'potty training'.  If you have any questions at all on this subject, please do not hesitate to ask.  We are by no means experts, but if we can help we will. :-)

New folders

We have purchased some zip-lock folders for each child to take home every day, so that they have somewhere to put their artwork, rather than squeezing it into a small ruck-sack or carrying it loosely and potentially spoiling it.

For those of you who don't use a daily diary anymore, we are going to make '2-way communication sheets' which will also go in there.  We will use them to write on messages and comments, and if you want to advise us of anything (as, like me, you may forget to mention something in the morning when dropping-off), then please use these sheets for this purpose.  

Menu - week beginning 13th September

Monday - Corned beef hash
Tuesday - Cheesy turkey and ham pasta with vegetables
Wednesday - Chicken curry and rice
Thursday - Shepherds pie
Friday - Fish fingers, potato wedges and baked beans