Dear All,
A moment to celebrate this week was how well all our new children settled in to their first sessions at Nursery School. Our outdoor learning environment is a welcoming safe place and seeing other children cross the threshold and happily play helps new children and their families to feel confident. This has been really wonderful to watch! Please continue your great support by getting your child ready to enter the garden, hang up their coats and bags, wash their hands and choose what and who they would like to play with first.
This week at Nursery School
We learnt how important it is to do our own shoes up in small groups and gave this time and patient support. There were many opportunities to take shoes on and off, with obstacle courses and wellie footprint painting. These experiences were repeated throughout the week.
We also focused on how to line up for lunch or handwashing and the children began to learn about different strategies for taking turns, for example by using a sand timer. We also taught a Makaton sign for “my turn, your turn”, by using both hands to touch your own chest and then extending both towards another person. We also set the expectation of larger group singing and stories at snack time, where big books support everyone to focus their attention on enjoying the story and joining in discussion around illustrations and events. (Only a small book in this image!)
Links to home learning
It’s so tempting to put your child’s shoes on for them. It’s an act of love! But, it is also so worthwhile to help your child be independent and feel good about being able to do it themselves. When you can, it helps to allow an extra 5 minutes to give you child time to learn to do up their shoes as you leave the house. The link below has lots of tips on how to support them with each stage (help with putting socks on as well).
If you have fun at home with any of these ideas, we would love you to take a photo and email Nursery School briefly telling us what happened, so that we can celebrate and learn from each other. I will include pictures and stories in the following newsletter.
Notices and housekeeping
- Thank you for your snack contributions this week. Please keep this up through the term.
- Please help us, if you can, this autumn term by donating a voluntary contribution of £10 which goes towards cooking, playdough and other arts and tactile resources. We will be giving out an envelope for you to return this week.
- Please can you name your child’s bag on the outside.
- Please talk to us via email about any issue that comes up for you around your child’s experience at school; no matter how small or large your problem is, we welcome and need this ongoing conversation to ensure that our provision is as good as it can be.
Next week
We will continue focusing on the skills children need for learning to be independent at school and feeling really good about being able to do simple important things for ourselves. Putting on coats; finding art resources; using the outdoor sheds and maths and writing trolleys; putting things away after you have finished; knowing when we are hungry or thirsty; helping each other…. The list is long! I will let you know what we have covered in the next newsletter.
Love from
The ACE Centre Nursery School Team
