This week we continued our learning about Pirates. We made eye-patches, treasure chests and painted and drew Pirate ships.

We have also been learning to sing a sea shanty.

In maths we have been completing pirate pictures by using and matching shapes and we are continuing to make 10 in different ways.

We had a Pirate Day! Many of us dressed up and looked as though we were ready to board a Pirate ship.
We started our day by drawing pirate pictures and writing a pirate sentence. We then put on our boots and trekked off to the forest for a camp fire, where we sang a sea shanty as we waited for our marshmallows to toast before eating our delicious s'mores.
This afternoon we played pin the eye patch on the pirate and we all walked the plank in a blindfold. We chose a friend that we trusted to guide us across.

After many weeks of patiently watering, caring for and watching our lettuces and potato plants, it was finally time to harvest what we had grown. 

We were excited to discover many potatoes when we tipped out the bags. We collected them and took them home along with some lettuce.

We were excited to taste what we had grown.

In our last week in the nursery we read the story 'The train ride' to link to our journey and transition into reception.

We used our fine motor skills to cut out shapes to create our own trains. 

Our last week of fun in the sun in the nursery!

This week we had a great surprise, we had a visit from the animal lady. 

She brought lots of animals with her for us to look at, hold and stroke. We got to see a baby honey bear, lizards, tortoise, a giant cockroach, a snake and a baby fox!

We enjoyed learning facts about the animals she brought, such as what they ate and where they lived.

This week in nursery we read the story 'Dear Zoo'.

We talked about the different animals in the story, we described the animals, we talked about their size and we talked about whether we would like them as a pet!

We had this story about animals ready for our surprise on Wednesday. A visit from the animal lady with her animals!

The children used their fine motor skills to cut strips of paper to create lions. They glued the strips around a paper plate to create a mane.

The children used their hand eye coordination skills to cut out spiral snakes.

What a lovely treat we have had today; the Animal Lady came to visit bringing with her a range of animals for us to hold and stroke. She told us all about the different animals; their names, where they live, what they eat and what they do. 

We met; a cockroach, a corn snake, a gecko, fox, bearded dragon, tortoise, owl and honey bear. 

This week our learning has been based around the book 'The Pirates Next Door'. This links in with our previous learning about the seas and oceans. 

The children have enjoyed learning new vocabulary based around pirates and are using this in their play. They have made large boats using cardboard boxes and the outdoor wooden blocks. They have dressed up as Pirates. 

The children have also completed many creative activities such as painting themselves as pirates with an eye-patch, stubble and a handkerchief hat, used different resources to make boats and tested these to see if they floated and made treasure maps, using tea bags to make the paper look older and remembering to mark where the treasure is hidden with a large X.

In maths be have been using the numicon pieces to find different to make 10 and 11. We have also been practising counting on from a given number. 

In phonics we are recapping previous weeks work to embed our understanding and reading and writing our tricky words. We have been writing dictated sentences every day and independently writing about Pirates. 

This week we have been looking at rhyming words.

We read the story 'Hairy Maclary', and emphasized all the rhyming words in the story. The children had fun repeating the names of the different dogs in the story.

We drew pictures of the dogs and then we had a go at cutting black strips and curling the strips by using scissors and a pencil. We then stuck them down on their dog drawing. To make it look like hairy Maclary! 

We shared books with our friends and looked at the pictures. We talked about the animals. 

Over the last two weeks we have been learning about different bodies of water that we can find on the Earth.  We have learned about oceans and linked this to the story 'The odd fish' and about rivers linked to the story of 'The Gingerbread man'. 

As we read the book 'The Odd Fish' the children realised that the odd fish was a plastic bottle. This has led on to lots of talking about how plastic in the oceans is really harming the sea creatures and how we need to be putting our rubbish into the bin or the re-cycle bins.

The children created some fantastic ocean scenes. They used wax to create the waves then the technique of 'washing' (using very watery paint) over the wax to reveal the waves. They have then made a variety of sea creatures using all sorts of different materials.
We even had our own classroom ocean that the children added to daily.

This week our learning has been based around the story of 'The Gingerbread man'. The children have really enjoyed reading the book and joining in with the Gingerbread man's chant of;
"Run, run, as fast as you can
You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread man".
They have sequenced the story and created some wonderful Gingerbread men in different mediums.
They enjoyed adding different spices to the play dough, they added; ground ginger, cinnamon, mixed spices and nutmeg before using the cutters to create their own gingerbread people. Our classroom smelled lovely.

The Gingerbread man has to cross a river in the story, so linking into our learning of oceans last week, we have explored how rivers are different.
We have learned that rivers start their life at the top of mountains, where the rain falls. The water runs down the side of the mountain creating a groove or channel in the earth. At the beginning the river is narrow but as the river water travels down the mountain the river gets wider and eventually reaches the sea.
We made our own river, with it beginning at the top of the mountain and travelling down. The children then made bridges over the river.

We have thought about why the Gingerbread man stopped at the edge of the river. The children suggested that the water might be too cold, that he might go under the water and that he might get lost in the water.
We wondered what would happen if the Gingerbread man had tried to swim across the river. So we did an experiment and learned that the Gingerbread man would have gone all soggy and squishy and eventually disintegrate!

In maths we have been thinking about partitioning numbers. This means thinking about two numbers that make another whole number, for example: 10 can be made of two parts 5 and 5, 6 and 4, 2 and 8.
We have also thought about sharing a number equally, so two people have the same amount.

We extended our learning by talking about equal and unequal numbers and then were introduced to the vocabulary; 'odd' and 'even'.  We made crowns with an even amount of Gingerbread men on them. 

In phonics we have been thinking about the different endings that we can add onto words. -ing, -ed, -ed (t) and -ed (d). We have been trying very hard to work out which ending is on our words and read them correctly and speedily.
We have used our phonics knowledge to read words around the classroom and to write sentences in our play.
We all tried to write the sentence 'I am painting the moon' in our phonics session today.

We are learning to read longer sentences, containing words that we have read during our phonics sessions.