Oak - Nursery
Welcome to Oak - Nursery!
The teacher in Nursery is Miss Williamson and Mrs Townsend.
In Nursery we are helped by Mrs Hovell, Miss Griffiths and Miss Barford.
Mrs Walton is our Specialist Speech and Language Intervention Assistant.
Meet our Team!
We have two nursery sessions and also offer 30 hours places:
Morning Nursery
The morning session starts at 8.35am and ends at 11.35am.
Afternoon Nursery
The afternoon session starts at 12.20pm and ends at 3.20pm.
30 Hours
Our 30 hours session starts at 9.20am and ends at 3.20pm.
We lock the door 10 minutes after the start of the session to keep the children safe. If you arrive late or you need to leave early you will need to use the main entrance of the school.
Please tell us if someone different is going to take your child home.
Children in the Nursery learn by playing and exploring, being active, and through creative and critical thinking which takes place both indoors and outdoors. We are proud to be working towards our 'Curiosity Approach Accreditation' and provide a homely, curiosity focused learning environment.
MONDAY is PE day in nursery. For PE the children need to take off their shoes and socks to go into the main hall. It would be really great if you could teach them how to take off and put on their own shoes and socks, to promote their independence. We ask that the children wear shoes with Velcro fastening and no laces.
FRIDAY is the day that we take part in Forest Schools. On this day children need to dress in warm clothes and have a pair of wellies that can be left on their peg. We go to Forest Schools in all weathers, so their clothing is really important.
Our fabulous learning environment!
Our learning 2021-2022
Summer 1 - Who Will I Be? This half term we will be learning all about the different jobs that people do. We will have a focus on farming and where our lovely healthy food comes from! Have a look at the picture below for more information on this half term's learning:
Spring 2 - Let's explore. This half term we will be looking at minibeasts, the life cycle of a frog, the life cycle of a butterfly, plants, Spring time and Easter.
03.02.2022 - This week we have been celebrating Chinese New Year. We have tried some delicious Chinese food, made dragons, made collage lanterns, dressed up in Chinese clothing, practised making Chinese symbols and played with noodles.
28.01.2022 This week we have learning about 'The Three Little Pigs' We read the story and made a story map together. This helped us to to retell the story using the actions. In the environment we used puppets and mask to retell the story and role play. We made houses out of straw, sticks and brick and predicated which would make the best house. We then blew them down with a hair dryer. Brick hoses are best! We enjoyed colouring mixing to paint picture of wolves and pigs.
07.01.2022 We have reading the story of the Gingerbread Man this week. We enjoyed joining in with the parts of the story we know. We made gingerbread men out of playdough, painted pictures and enjoyed retelling the story using props.
Curious Characters
Our topic or Spring 1 is Curious Characters, We will be looking at lots of different fairy tales such as: The Gingerbread Man, Little Red Riding Hood and The Little Red Hen. We will be looking at the behaviour, feelings and actions of the characters and relating them to our school rules.
Forest Schools will be on a Friday so please come dressed for the weather as we will be outside for the whole session.
Autumn 2 - I wonder...
During this term we will be learning about 'I Wonder...' as we think about all of the wonderful things that we have to celebrate. A big focus will be upon developing our skills in understanding the world. We will be looking at the ways that people celebrate and how this is similar and different to us. In particular we will learn about Bonfire Night, Remembrance Day, Diwali, Birthdays and Christmas. We will also be extremely creative, so keep your eyes peeled for the wonderful creations that we will be sending home!
What an amazing time we had when Santa came to visit. Merry Christmas everyone.
What a wonderful surprise we had when we had the chance to play in the snow at Nursery.
We had so much fun decorating the Christmas tree.
Look at our fantastic Christingle making.
We loved exploring what changes we could make to the ice.
This week the children loved being scientists. We experimented by adding different safe kitchen chemicals together to see how they reacted. They fizzed in the jar like colourful fireworks.
In PE we carefully balanced on the equipment in the hall. Then the children moved their bodies like fireworks as they jumped off and landed safely on the mat. Well done everyone, whizz, bang, swirl!
We having been finding out all about the festival of Diwali in nursery. We really enjoyed making our Diva lamps and tasting vegetable samosas as we joined in with celebrations for the festival of light.
Autumn 1 - What makes me unique?
During this half term we will be learning about 'What makes me unique?' A big focus will be upon developing our skills in understanding the world. We will be looking at ourselves, where we live and the people who are special to us. We will also be doing lots of PSED to help settle us all into nursery for the start of our new school year. We will begin looking for signs of Autumn at our forest explorers site each Friday. We will base our learning on the things that we show our teachers that we are really interested in within these themes. Look out for activities including self-portraits and home made vegetable soup!
As the season changes to autumn, we have been thinking about harvest and where our food comes from. We had great fun planting and digging in the garden.
We're going on a bear hunt. We're going to catch a big one. We're not scared, What a beautiful day.
The children had lots of fun painting self-portraits. They looked carefully at all of their features and added fantastic detail. You can almost see their characters coming through in their paintings, amazing job, well done everyone.
The children have really enjoyed making puppets of themselves or family members this week. They have shown their creative side by choosing their own materials. We also looked at different ways of fastening our puppets and some of the children decided to make them move.
It has been wonderful to welcome our new children into nursery this week, they are settling in well and enjoying making new friends.
We have all been artists this week and explored the work of Frida Kahlo. We have looked at the similarities and difference of ourselves and our new friends, talked about our facial features and then enjoyed creating our own self-portraits.
I hope that you have also been pleased to see all of the lovely pictures your children have been bringing home to share with you and I am sure that they are taking pride of place on your fridge door. Many more to come!
Summer 2- Unexpected oceans
During this last half term we will be discovering the wonders of the oceans and their beaches.
A big focus will be upon developing our understanding of the world around us, as we explore rock pools, sandy beaches and the wider oceans. Discovering creatures of the deep including the rainbow fish which will be our talk for writing. We will be thinking about holidays including traditional seaside beaches, with puppet shows, buckets and spades from our very own seaside role play shop and creating and tasting varying flavoured ice creams.
As will be working on our sense of community both locally and globally, we will be exploring what happens if we do not look after the oceans and our planet and holding our very own litter pick in the school grounds.
We also look forward to adventuring like pirates and mermaids on our dress up, when we will be designing and testing out boats both big and small and imagining sailing around the world to focus on opposites in Australia.
Australia is also the country that we will be representing in our Olympics week near the end of term. We will be taking part in many events, races and building our own obstacle course.
We hope that we will all feel like champions this last half term as we get ready for sailing on to new adventures.
What a fantastic Olympic week we had with our very busy bodies. The children got involved in lots of physical activities and found out lots about our chosen country Australia. Great fun!
There be pirates here at Healdswood, arrgh! We had fantastic pirate adventures this week in nursery. We created both big and small pirate ships and pretended to sail the seas. We followed treasure maps and filled our gold chests, some children even had to walk the plank!
We explored the differences between man made and natural materials and thought about what could be recycled. The children were very concerned about the amount of rubbish and litter that ended up in our oceans. The children held their own litter pick on the school grounds and were very proud of how they were helping to keep the sea creatures safe.
We found out so much about the creatures that live in the sea. One of our favourite stories about sea creatures was the rainbow fish, so we made our own colourful fish.
We loved experimenting with materials for boat making. We discovered which ones floated or sank to the bottom of the ocean.
We really enjoyed making our own seaside ice cream. We made strawberry, chocolate, lemon and marshmallow flavour. After testing out all of the flavours we voted for our favourite. The winner was lemon!
If you would like to make some at home we used double cream, condensed milk and lemon juice. Simply mix and freeze. Enjoy!
Summer 1- Imagination
During this term we will be discovering the magical ‘colours of our imaginations’.
We will be exploring and thinking about the colours all around us of nature, art and even music! Look out for our developing sensory garden and natural artwork.
A big focus will be upon developing our imaginations and we are looking forward to a virtual visit to the theatre. To support us with imagining the colours of our feelings and our dreams, we will be sharing the story colour monster and our talk for writing will be 'Brown bear, brown bear what to you see?'
As will be working on our skills of being self-confident to have a go and find things out, for STEM week we will be decorating colourful biscuits and investigating colour through scientific experiments. We are also welcoming new children to our nursery and will be spending some time getting to know each other and the nursery rainbow rules and routines.
We imagining a colourful and happy half term for us all to look forward to!
This week we have been looking at colours all around us. For Saint George's day we looked at the England flag and then imagined what wonderful patterns and colours we would like to see on flags. So we designed and made our own flags and decorated our sand castles with them..
We added lots of colourful ingredients to our rocky roads, you can imagine how good it tasted.
This week we carefully used adult tools and materials to create our very own colourful mosaic planter for our new tree.
The children loved designing and applying the coloured tiles with the adhesive and were very proud of their beautiful master piece.
Take a look at what our awesome scientists have been experimenting with in nursery this week. We mixed together some house hold chemicals to create our own lava lamp. We where amazed when it foamed up over the top when we added in some extra fizz. WOW!
We have been creating colourful weavings on a large scale, both inside and outside. Weaving in and out and imagining what the finished product would look like.
We had so much fun working together with the rainbow parachute. Creating fast and slow waves and discovering which colourful ball bounced off first with our dreamy wavy movements.
Great fun day of music and laughter on rock star day. We rocked it!
We have been thinking about movements to music and imagining shapes and pictures to match the music. As part of STEM week we planned, designed and decorated biscuits by taking our special biscuit decorating pens for a walk around the icing following the music.
I hope that they had as much fun eating them at home as we had decorating them in nursery.
After half term, our topic will explore 'Nurturing Nature'.
We will be thinking about farms, farm machinery, the animals who live on farms and where our food comes from.
We will also find out about mother and baby animals and life cycles as we celebrate spring and Easter.
We will even be hatching our own chicks and watching carefully as they grow!
We have been finding out about lots of different baby animals and matching them to their parents. Some of the names for baby animals where tricky to remember, we have definitely been expanding our vocabulary.
When we did a virtual visit to a farm shop, we found out that farms can be busy places producing crops for us to eat. We explored a variety of vegetables with our senses and discovered some that we had not known before. Here we are printing with some of the vegetables, we also chopped fruit and threaded it onto skewers to eat. Now we have made our own farm shop in our nursery outside area, roll up roll up and see what fruit and vegetables you can find.
We were so kind and caring looking after our baby chicks, so we explored how other animals look after their babies. This included washing baby clothes for human babies and making nests for baby birds. Using the tools for building and filling the nests also helped to strengthen our hands and improve hand co-ordination and control.
Take a look at some of our other favourite activities from our nurturing nature topic this half term.
In nursery, we love baking and could not miss the chance to make chocolate Easter nests. The children followed the instruction carefully and counted in their chocolate eggs one at a time. I hope that they had as much fun eating them at home as we did baking them together. Enjoy your Healdswood Easter egg each and have a wonderful Easter everyone!
During this term we will be learning about 'Once upon a time.'
We will discover the magical world of fairy tales, castles, princesses, knights and dragons through lots of different stories and traditional tales.
We will explore story language as we develop our speaking, listening and communication skills.
Our talk for writing will be 'There was a princess long ago' which we hope everyone will enjoy acting out. So a big focus will also be on practising large and small movements as we use songs and actions to help us retell stories.
Our physical skills might also be put to the test as we have a go at making and flipping pancakes at the end of this half term.
We will base our learning on the things that we show our teachers that we are really interested in within the themes.
