Category: Rabbit News

Rabbits and Foxes News March 2016

Literacy

We have been practicing writing our names this month! Some of the Rabbits were already very confident at writing their names, but some were a little unsure. After lots of practice, we have increased our confidence and the clarity or our writing is much better. The Foxes are starting to write their names too, with some of them being able to now write some of the letters in their names. We have also continued with our Letter of the Week this month, getting through letters b, c and d. The children were very good at going around the nursery and finding things beginning with certain letters.

Numeracy

We have been looking at our daily routines within nursery; what we do in the mornings, afternoons and evenings. We spoke about when we brush our teeth, when we eat breakfast and dinner and other daily activities. Most of the children were able to tell us what they did in the morning and evenings, and we also very briefly introduced time and the hands of the clock. We continued on with this idea of routine and created a bar chart to observe if the children knew what days they came into nursery. This proved a bit tricky but we counted up how many children we had in each day and were able to work out the busiest and quietest day in nursery.

Health and Wellbeing

As our topic was All About Me this month, we discussed our bodies and how they work. We drew around one of the children and then started to add in our body parts and talk about what we use them for. The children really liked this activity and joined in well, asking lots of questions! We also had discussions about privacy and why we need some privacy at certain times. For example, we made a mind map of how to give someone privacy when they are at the toilet.

Social Studies

We decided it would be a good opportunity to use our topic to discuss our feelings and how our actions can affect others. We had lots of group discussions about how we can make people feel happy and we can make them feel sad. We encouraged gentle hands and listening ears as this would make everyone very happy. We made our own little emotion sticks using straws and circular paper where the children could draw an emotion onto them. We reminded the children about using their manners such as saying please and thank you, and everyone in the nursery has noticed a big difference in the children’s manners, so well done guys!

Trips and Other Info

We have been carrying on with our Forest Schools and Care Home trips, with the first block coming to an end this month. Our Forest Schools will start up again soon but our Care Home trips have already resumed with a new group of children going this time. We have also been visiting the library every Thursday and we all get to pick out books to bring back to nursery. The library has commented that we are one of the only nurseries they trust to keep their books in good condition! We also had a trip to the museum and to the zoo this month which was lots of fun and everyone was very tired afterwards! We also want to say welcome to our two news friend who joined us, Nuala and Gigi, who have both settled into Meadows really well!

Rabbits and Foxes News February 2016

February has been a very fun and exciting month for everyone at Nursery. We have been learning a lot and have been having loads of fun too.

We would like to wish Megan, Zoe and Sophia a very big Happy 4^th Birthday!

Scotland Topic

Our Scotland topic has kept us very busy. We learned about Robert Burns, that he was a poet and where he came from. We celebrated Burns Day by having delicious haggis for our snack. We spoke about living in Edinburgh and what things we like do here. We also filled our topic box with ‘Scottish things’ such as Irn-Bru, Haggis, Shortbread, Oats, Scottish slang books, and various other bits and pieces that we enjoyed looking through.

‘All about me’

After a week of close observations on the children’s interests we have decided that our new topic is going to be ‘All about me’. The children have been playing ‘mums and dads’. A few children have recently become or soon will be big brothers and sisters and are also very interested in our bodies growing. We will be looking closely at our bodies, what we need to help us to grow, to keep healthy and what our bodies do to help us. We have already made a start on drawing self portraits that look fantastic! We will also be talking about what country we come from and what languages we can speak. We can’t wait to get started!

Forest Schools

Forest Schools has started again and we are having a great time. The weather has been a little wet and cold at times but that has certainly not stopped us. We have been busy building tents and small dens to hide under and enjoy a hot chocolate to heat us up when we arrive. We have been practising our balancing skills alongside our confidence when walking on the tree stumps and logs. We have been collecting sticks and making different patterns, looking at different kinds of bugs under the magnifying glass and of course playing hide and seek as we have an endless amount of hiding places.

The Care Home

On a Tuesday afternoon we have been enjoying visiting a nearby Care Home. We take along with us puzzles, paper and pens, books and recently we have taken family photographs to show the residents who we live with. We know that when we go to the Care Home that we are making the people there very happy. They always make us feel very welcome and kindly give us a homemade cake and juice.

 

 

Rabbits and Foxes News January 2016

Hello everyone, we hope you have had a good start to your year!

As you all know we have been looking at Scotland and its stereotypes. We had the opportunity to make our own tartans, which coincided with our patterns theme. To celebrate Robert Burns, some of us created our own poems: one about Frozen, one about our families and lots more! We even got to try some haggis, which most of us really liked!

We have continued our weekly trips to the library and have been bringing books back about Scotland. We even managed to find The Gruffalo and Room on The Broom in Scots!

We have also been looking at patterns over the last few weeks, to see if we can find them in our environment and to create our own patterns. We made our own tartan kilts. We also had an activity where we could make our own patterns with sticks and pine cones!

Everyone is still doing lots of baking for our snacks and the children have been helping to prepare the fruit for snack time too! We have been discussing with children what is healthy and unhealthy and we made a list and mind map of all our comments!

Our Care Home visits and Forest Schools visits have started back up again with new groups of children! At Forest Schools, it was our first week so we established boundaries and discussed the rules. Then we had a big game of hide and seek. At the Care Home, again with it being our first visit with a new group of children, all the children got to pick a toy to take with them and introduce themselves to everyone!

Rabbits and Foxes News December 2015

Firstly we would like to wish Morag and Battista a Happy 3^rd birthday & Baz and Zoe a Happy 4^th birthday when it comes around.  We hope you both have a fantastic day.

December has been a very exciting month for both the Rabbits and the Foxes.

On Friday the 18^th we had our Christmas show “The 12 days of Christmas” and our Christmas party afterwards.

We had been practising twice day for the last month and it definitely paid off. We all had a fantastic time and all performed so well in front of our teachers, family and our friends.

We sang a selection of Christmas songs including Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and we Wish you a Merry Christmas to finish.

Once our show was finished it was time for our delicious snack. We all had our own party bags with a selection of treats inside.

After snack we enjoyed playing party games in the Flower Room, where we enjoyed playing musical chairs, musical bumps and pass the parcel!

Later on after the games were finished, Tricky Ricky made a magical appearance and we enjoyed being entertained by him for almost an hour.

We all had a fantastic time at our show and party and are looking forward to practising for our summer show next year!

We hope that everyone has a magical Christmas and that Santa is very good to everyone.

See you all in 2016.

Rabbits and Foxes news November 2015

We would like to say a big Happy Birthday to Edith who turned 3 recently and we would also like to welcome Holly, Raphie, Sam, Aria and Zander to the Foxes!

During the month of November we have been very busy exploring a number of themes or topics. We started off over the last few months looking at Autumn and thinking about all the different signs of Autumn that we had spotted when out and about with our friends and our families. The children told us that they had seen the leaves turning different colours and falling off the trees! Some of the children had collected conkers and pine cones too. We then moved on to focusing on our independence skills as we are all growing up and some of us are preparing for school next Summer. We then celebrated Scottish book week by reading a number of stories by Scottish authors, and we are now thinking about Winter and Christmas time as we come closer to our Christmas performance.

Literacy

As we explored Scottish book week, we enjoyed reading a number of Scottish stories and learnt about what the book cover can tell us about the story. We talked about who the Author is, what the title might tell us and what an illustrator is. The children shared their favourite story book titles with us and we discussed what we liked about our favourite books. We had a lot of fun listening to the Gruffalo in Scots. There were lots of funny new words we had never heard before. We had good fun guessing what they meant. We learnt that the Scots word for a Fox is a Todd. After reading a few of our favourite stories we played a game where one of us pretended to be a character from the story and the others asked questions about the events in the book. This helped us to think like the character and to begin to understand different viewpoints.

Numeracy

As we lead up to our Christmas performance, we have been focusing on the numbers 1 to 12 and exploring these numbers, their form and what they represent in the 12 days of Christmas. We have been carrying out lots of different activities to help us to recognise and to remember the numbers 1 – 12 such as sorting activities where we try to find so many objects to represent the numbers, using the magnetic numbers to create the sequence of numbers, using the number stones out in the garden to find the numbers 1-12 and many more!

Health and wellbeing

As we have been working on our independence skills this month, we have been building our confidence and awareness of all the things we are able to do all by ourselves! We love trying out new things for ourselves and being able to show our friends as well as our mummies and daddies what we can do! We have had lots of fun having races to see who can put their shoes on the fastest, even the teachers joined in! Practicing these skills not only helps to boost our confidence, but they also help to prepare us for school and to further develop our fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

Expressive arts

This month the children have been very creative as they have modelled hedgehogs out of clay and match sticks after a lovely discussion about the animals which hibernate during the colder months.

After reading lots of lovely Scottish stories, including the Gruffalo in Scots, some of the children decided to draw pictures of the Gruffalo, they are very creative!

We all loved watching the snow fall one Friday afternoon and this sparked a good chat about building snowmen, sledging and snowball fights. The children were so excited about the falling snow that we all decided to use chalk to draw our own snowmen. Our lovely chilly snowman friends are up on the wall so our families can have a look.

 

Rabbits & Foxes News October 2015

We would like to wish Happy Birthday! to Callum and Frank, who have both turned 3 this month.

During the month of October, the Rabbits and Foxes have been learning all about ‘Land’. To start the topic off we asked the children what they knew about ‘Land’. The Rabbits and Foxes came up with some fantastic ideas for example: “vegetables come from farms”, “animals eat grass” and there are lots of different types of land ie “sand” and “soil”.

Literacy

The children have been learning the sounds of the letters in their names.  We have spent time building our names with magnetic letters and sticking objects that start with the letter sound in their letter plate. We have been introducing rhyming words by reading rhyming books like The Cat in the Hat and Room on the Broom.

Numeracy

This month we have been introducing measuring.  The children have been using the measuring tape to measure the length of objects in and around the room.  We have been concentrating on counting to twenty and recognising numbers up to number ten.

Health and Wellbeing

“I am learning where living things come from and how they grow, develop and are nurtured.” To cover this learning outcome we began with a discussion of what is living and what is not. Next we planted some sunflowers and pumpkins and talked about how to care for plants ie by watering them and giving them sunshine. We then went on to look at our own bodies and what we need to grow and develop. The children were very good at naming their body parts, how we use them and how we can look after our bodies, for example drinking milk to help our bones grow strong. To end this learning outcome we drew around two of our friends & painted on clothes, gluing on wool for hair etc.

Technologies

’Together we enjoy handling, tasting and learning about different foods, discovering ways in which eating and drinking may help us grow and keep healthy’. To cover this learning outcome, we firstly looked where foods come from and what farming equipment and machines are used to help the farmers plant, grow and harvest the different foods. Next we had a discussion about what our body needs to work, along with which foods are healthy and which are unhealthy. The children gave lots of ideas of different foods. Finally we had a taste test, which was great. We had a range of textured foods for us to taste. Our favourites were candy floss and orange juice but most of us did not like pickles or sparkling water.

 

 

Rabbits News April 2015

This month the Rabbits have been learning all about Spring. We have really enjoyed watching all the daffodils and blossoms bloom across the Meadows and the Rabbits have been great detectives searching for the signs of Spring.

We have all been very busy in the front garden this month as we have planted some wildflower seeds which Baz’s mum kindly gave us. We have all really enjoyed popping out to the garden with our watering cans and rulers to water our seeds and measure their growth. We know that plants need water to help them grow as well as light and soil. Please have a look at our flowers growing in the garden. The tulips that we planted in the wellies are growing really well!

This month we had some very very exciting visitors to look after! We had a special delivery of 10 little chick eggs which we had to look after as they began to hatch. We absolutely loved watching the eggs hatch and the little chicks break free and grow. We had a big chat all about what we should name our chicks and drew beautiful pictures of them all in our floorbook. We all had our own chick diary to fill in as the chicks grew to say how many had hatched each day etc. Sadly we had to say goodbye to the chicks as they headed off to a farm on the west coast.

We have been so lucky this month as we also enjoyed a big trip to East Links Farm at the beginning of the month where we zoomed around on go-karts and said hello to all of the animals. We had a ball playing on the jelly belly and the trampolines and having a ride on the train. Some of our mummies, daddies and grandparents even came along.

 

 

 

Foxes News April 2015

This month the Foxes have been very busy! We have welcomed Edith and Callum into our group from the Squirrels and have really enjoyed getting to know them.

We have loved doing some baking this month and all worked together to make some tasty fruity flapjacks! We all helped to mash the fruit and mix all the ingredients together. We thought the best part was eating them!

We have been exploring letters this month and looking at the letters which make up our names. We have done this through a range of activities such as using paint and letter sponges to print our names, using the magnetic letters to find the letters in our names and listening to letter sounds. We’re very good at finding our names.

We have been working on our memory skills recently as our teachers introduced a Monday morning newsflash time. At this time our teachers sit with us and talk about what we did at the weekend. We then draw a beautiful picture and our teacher writes down what we have said about our picture. We really enjoy having this one to one time.

We have been looking after the birds this month as we were eco warriors and used recycled kitchen roll tubes to make bird feeders. We rolled the tubes in honey before rolling them in bird seed and hanging them up outside. The birds must have really enjoyed them as there are no seeds left on them!

 

 

 

 

 

Rabbits News February 2015

We would like to welcome Mia and Baz to our Rabbits group as well as our new Practitioner Jessica who will be key worker for some of the Rabbit children.

This month the children have expressed an interest in Transport.

The children have been practicing their excellent mathematical skills through following instructions as Ethan showed everyone how to make a paper aeroplane. The children then had the chance to fly their aeroplanes and measure how far they flew, writing the number down themselves.

It was then Murray’s turn to be the teacher, showing the children how to make treasure maps, working in teams to create a route to find the treasure! Murray even told everyone how to make the maps look old using tea bags – well done Murray!

We continued our brilliant maths skills as we conducted a traffic survey out in the Meadows. The children used tally marks to record the number of bikes, cars, buses and walkers passing by. The children then combined all their findings to discover the most popular mode of transport.

We have all been mini scientists this month! We carried out some experiments to find out how a sandy road surface or an icy surface would affect how well toy cars would travel. The children discovered that it was harder for the cars to travel over sand and the ice made the cars slide.

We then carried out another science experiment where we had a look at floating and sinking. The children predicted which objects we thought would float and which would sink then tried it out to see if we were right! We even talked about water displacement and buoyancy. We then talked about how boats stay afloat even when they are so big and heavy. Our teachers think we are all very clever.

This month Laura has started up our Pre-school times on Tuesdays and Thursdays. During this time the children learn the skills to prepare them for school. So far the children have enjoyed playing alphabet bingo and learning some sight words, using these sight words to create a book.

At Forest schools some of the Rabbits have had a fantastic time climbing trees, building and having a go on a rope swing, and climbing over spider webs which the teachers built for them using ropes. We also practised our teamwork skills by getting the whole team across a balancing beam.

 

Foxes News February 2015

This month at Meadows Nursery has been really exciting for us. We have had two new friends join the Foxes, Mia and Giacomo. Mia and Giacomo started towards the end of the month and we are very excited to get to know them and show them all of the things that we do at nursery.

We have been going on lots of adventures to the park over by the Meadows this month. We have had lots of fun playing on the swings, the slide and running around playing hide and seek. We also took a picnic with us and had our snack there too, we took a blanket for us to sit on and we even had a drink of hot chocolate to heat us up. We really enjoyed it and are looking forward to the next time, we even said that Mickey and Millie can come next time to play.

We have a new display in the Garden Room and we have made it our Spring display even though it is not quite spring yet. We couldn’t wait to make baby animals, daffodils and other spring creations for our wall display.

 

 

 

At the end of the month we had our tea party. We have been busy making chocolate chip cookies and we can’t wait to try them. When we are doing baking we all know to put on our apron and wash our hands. We got very “sticky” and “messy” when mixing the mixture together. We all helped to add the ingredients together and mix them. Baking is one of our favourite activities at nursery.