Welcome to Puffin Class – our school nursery!

This page celebrates the wonderful learning that happens in Puffin Class. Our learning is done through play; it's how children learn best! We follow the children's interests, meaning no two weeks are the same. 

Lots of practical information about our nursery can be found under the 'key Information' tab.

 

Spring 1: January – February half-term

We have loved exploring the varied weather we have experienced this week. It has been great to have a hands-on experience of frost, snow and freezing temperatures. The children enjoyed developing their gross motor skills by making tracks in the snow by pushing crates and prams, running, jumping and making snow angels. We exercised our fine motor muscles by using spray bottles and pipettes to squirt coloured water on the snow and showed our creativity when mark making with sticks to create pictures and patterns.

 

Autumn 2: November - Christmas

The children returned to school full of tales from their half-term holiday. One of our big focusses in nursery is helping the children develop their communication skills. Since we have returned, we have been doing lots of speaking and listening about our first-hand experiences, with the staff supporting the children as needed.

This half-term will be full of festivals and celebrations. We've enjoyed starting to learn about some of them, including Halloween, Bonfire Night, Diwali, Hanukkah and Christmas. We can't wait to experience them and find out more!

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We excitedly welcomed Catherine from Tiny Tales and Tunes, who came in to run a highly interactive storytelling session with our nursery children. We focused on the tale of Little Red Riding Hood and all had a wonderful time bringing the story to life! We marched into the woods with bells and shakers, we wafted scarves as we weaved and dodged around the wolf, danced with our pompoms and snoozed under the stars. At the end, we partied with Little Red Riding Hood and Grandma, bouncing party balls on the parachute – it was a busy morning! 

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In Puffin Class we really enjoyed taking part in 'World Nursery Rhyme Week'. The children enjoyed saying, singing, performing and joining in with a wide range of rhymes and songs. We have had great fun learning some new rhymes and sharing our favourites with the rest of the children in nursery.

The children were thrilled to welcome their families to our Early Years World Nursery Rhyme Week event. We enjoyed performing our rhymes and songs and had lots of fun completing activities linked to this year's selection of rhymes. It was amazing to see so many people coming together to celebrate the work the children have been doing.

 

Autumn 1: September - October half-term

We are so excited to be back! It is wonderful to have a classroom full of busy, happy children again. Over the past few weeks we have been thrilled to see and catch up with those children who are returning for a second year in nursery, as well as welcoming and settling new families into Puffin Class.

This half-term our focus will be helping the children to settle in; getting to know and build, or re-establish, relationships with the adults and friendships with other pupils, as well as familiarising themselves with our setting, learning where everything is and most importantly, having lots of opportunities to play and explore. 

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The 10th October was World Mental Health Day. We used this as a focus for our learning all week, exploring what 'mental health' is and how it is just as important as our 'physical health'. In nursery, we learnt lots about our brilliant brains and how they work. We also enjoyed playing the face game – seeing how many different emotions we could think of and represent with facial expressions! We were wowed with the way the children could name and identify different emotions and with what they knew about those emotions – when they might feel them and what they could do to change the emotion if they so wished.

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In Puffin Class we love stories, books and reading. The staff spend lots of time engaging with the children to further develop their early reading skills and can often be found snuggled in the book corner reading stories. Each half-term we select a 'favourite five', which are five books that we repeatedly read and revisit over that half-term (throughout the year these include fiction, non-fiction, rhymes, poems, traditional tales and books by known authors), allowing the children to become really familiar with them. This in turn helps develop inference, retelling, comprehension and the acquisition of new vocabulary.