It's nearly Christmas time! We have to get prepared for it... let's start from painting a postbox for our letters to Santa...

... and decorating it, we love Christmas decorations!

Ok, now it is time for writing our letters to Santa...

... and sending them to North Pole.

Some more amazing art for our own Christmas cards...

... and now, let's all sing together some Christmas song, it is so much fun!

Of course, we are busy with making art as usual.

Now, look at what amazing things we can create using wooden blocks. A real dance floor, for example...

... or a train, next station: North Pole!

We also love drawing, especially when we do it on the floor.

Here, we are drawing pictures of cats, taking inspiration from a cat encyclopedia.

Moreover, as always, we also love messy play. It can be with sticky gloop...

... or with shaving foam, it looks like snow!

One of the children's mum shared with us an amazing 'bug habitat'. We used it to get a closer look to wiggly worms, woodlice and slugs.

We also never forget to be physically active, from playing bowling...

... to practising dribbling a ball around a line of logs and then trying to score a goal.

But... we like to change the games and decide our own rules... here we are using the same logs to set up our own obstacle course. They were really wobbly, but as you can see we always help each other!

 What a better way to count down another day to Christmas than lighting a real fire and using it to prepare a delicious hot chocolate?

Don't forget to check our last update of the year about our astonishing adventures next week! See you soon!

We have been practicing our eye-hand coordination and our gross motor skills by using sticks to make lines on the sand in trays to find out  the underlying pictures...

... we also eagerly accepted this further challenge: are we able to trace the snowball's trajectory to replicate marks as zigzag lines, circles or waves? Of course we are! And we are enjoying it too!

Mark-making is not just using pencils or pens, it can be done is so many different ways. Here, for example, we are playing with 'gloop' and what better opportunity than to mix colourful, sticky mix of flour, water and powder paint, using spoons, sticks or even toy cars, to reinforce our wrists and make simple marks such as lines, curves and circular movements.

What is normally considered 'yucky' can be a very entertaining for us... What about mixing a whole tray of cooked spaghetti with our hands? "They are soft", "they are sticky", they are... just fun!

All right, now it is time to get down to business. Woodwork is a serious thing, look how we are focused on practicing our skills with nails, hammers and pliers.

There is a fire over there! Hurry up! The fire brigade is coming to help!

We take care of people and we take care of animals too, it doesn't matter if they are wiggly, slimy and if someone is scared of them, we are definitely not!

Time to relax at the 'mud kitchen', preparing a soup made of water, berries... and a lot of mud, of course!

The building area in the garden is always very busy, this time we have created a special machine that works with water, using pipes, gutters and a tank full of water. It really worked!

Cooperation is essential when you are planning to build an amazing space ship.

Music is great, especially when you share it with your friends, for example playing a glockenspiel together and listening to the different tones...

... or dancing and singing Christmas songs together, it is so exciting!

See you next week for more fun at Brookhill Nursery!

Rainy weather doesn't stop us from having fun in the garden. For example, we can use the pipes to build a long and exciting ramp for our cars.

The see-saw can be used for the same purpose as well...

...or we can turn it into a giant balancing scale to measure blocks in weight. Maths really is all around you! We had the opportunity to use language such as 'heavy' or 'heavier' and 'light' or 'lighter'.

And the garden is full of opportunities for amazing discoveries too. For example, this week we have spotted some mushrooms growing on a log.

And when the weather is rainy, it can be actually a lot of fun! We can colour the muddy puddles and enjoy mixing paints to make different colours! What a science!...

... or turn them into 'soapy puddles'!

We also had the chance to play music using a real 'glockenspiel': it is colourful and it makes a very special sound!

Meanwhile, inside... we are using paper, sellotape and scissors to build our own telescopes or scissors...

...or exploring new ways to create art using play-dough...

We are still having a lot of fun pretending to be ice-cream sellers, operating the till and exchanging 'money'...

... or exploring how magnets work.

Here, we are very busy trying to make watches to wear on our wrists...

...while here we are experimenting with mark-making. We have a special dice, with different kinds of marks on its 6 sides: the challenge is to roll the dice and try to draw the same kind of mark on paper, such as zigzag lines, spirals, rainbows, etc.

We have been using measuring tapes to measure and compare in length different sticks or planks. We have also been using mathematical language such as "centimetres", "metres" and "miles" or such as "longer" and "longest" or "shorter" and "shortest".

For our woodwork session, this time we have been hammering nails into some wood through bottle tops. This is a fun opportunity to practice both our focus and our muscles!

We have been 'fishing' ducks in a 'pond' using a special fishing rod. We challenged each other to see who could fish the most, also practising our ability to count up to 10.

The challenges are endless in our garden... From walking on 'balancing buckets'...

...to setting up a huge obstacle course around the outdoor area!

And the fun continues inside, with our very popular 'shopping list' game, which encourages our memory and literacy skills, trying to fill up our 'trolley' with everyday items from the supermarket such as eggs, tomatoes, washing powder and toothpaste.

We have also been very inventive in the art area, using recycling materials to build another incredible space rocket full of ingenious features.

Here, we are creating structures using special straws and joints, there is no limit to our imagination.

Sometimes it is fun to just stop a draw a picture, art can be created anywhere!

We have also been learning how the names of English letters can be very different from the sounds they make in words... did you know that the first sound in the word 'nose' is 'nnnnnn'?

See you soon for further updates about our amazing experiences and discoveries at Brookhill Nursery!

We have been extending the skills we learned the previous week with pumpkins by using hammers and nails on our woodwork table in the garden, we continued to listen to instructions making sure to keep ourselves and our friends safe! 

We have been exploring the ‘dark den’, playing with cubes that glow in the dark and change colour. It was so exciting!

 
We have been creating our own puppet show too, using a table as a stage and crates as seats for the audience. You can probably see us hiding behind the table to operate the puppets and using the puppets creatively to express our imagination!

We had loads of opportunities to make our own artwork, one of which was using coloured Cheerios to make a special collage. Look at the shapes and the patterns we have crafted...

We also love to experiment with different materials at the junk modelling table, continuing to make props for our stories and games!

Wearing costumes is always fun and gives us the opportunity to enhance our role-play games!

To practice our coordination skills and develop more advanced skills that will help us with further mark-making and letter formation, we played a game where we used tweezers to pick up mini bones and feed a ‘dog’.

Who needs a ride on a bus? There is room for everybody on this one we created in the garden… 


​Hope you all have a lovely weekend! See you next week!

We have been practicing our balancing skills by walking on a boardwalk, paying attention not to fall in the 'crocodile pit', "alligators have sharp teeth!"

We have been painting pictures of penguins by observing what they look like and using black, white, orange and yellow coloured paint! We have really been focusing on the small details such as their beaks and feathers!

To extend our interest in penguins, we have been recreating a polar habitat, using small world animals, cotton balls, small white rocks and white glitter.

The opportunities for arts activity are endless at Brookhill Nursery, from decorating junk materials to make  props for our own role-play...

... and experimenting with watercolour painting, look how we are passionate about it!

We also have been continuing to extend our interest in woodwork, this time hammering nails into a log (it's a little bit harder, but we love challenges!)...

... and removing them using plyers.

We have been playing with shaving foam, messy play stimulates our senses and it is so much fun!

... and one of our discoveries was a magnificent Pentatomoidea, commonly known as 'shield bug', it was "ticklish but not scary", they can't hurt!

We have been role-playing being in an ice-cream shop, with customers and shopkeepers, handling 'money' and using a real till.

We have also been playing basketball, each taking turns and cheering each other on when trying to get the ball in the net...

... and after all these physical activities and fun, we have been making a restoring lemonade, using a squeezer, it was delicious!

That's all for now, see you next week!
​

​Armistice Day is on 11 November and is also known as Remembrance Day. It marks the day World War One ended, at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918. A two-minute silence is held at 11am to remember the people who have died in wars.

We made/painted our own poppies that we sold to raise money! Thank you to all those who donated :)

​Diwali is the five-day festival of lights, celebrated by millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains across the world. The festival, which coincides with the Hindu New Year, celebrates new beginnings and the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness

We made divas out of clay and decorated them with paint, and celebrated light by creating our own fireworks using powder paint on a large roll of paper outside. we enjoyed mixing the colours and flicking the paint to "be the explosion" of light that the fireworks give off!

We prepared pumpkin soup for Halloween, we enjoyed scooping out all the insides and showed a lot of interest in the seeds! Once it was cooked we all got to taste it...it was delicious! We also took the opportunity to practice our eye-hand coordination skills, hammering nails into a pumpkin. We listened carefully and followed adults’ instructions, so were able to be safe with our friends and stayed engaged at the activity for such a long time. What fun!

It is going to be Remembrance Day soon, so we painted our own pictures of poppies!

​Recycling is not just throwing waste materials into the appropriate recycling bins, it can also be converting them into new objects… and it is even more fun when we use them to make building or props for our role-play!

Speaking of buildings, look at what we are able to do in the garden using blocks! Isn’t it great?

We loved the opportunity to mark make on a large scale!

The boys had a great time mixing potions in the mud kitchen!

We hope you had a great week break over the half term! It has been lovely hearing what you have all been up too! We are happy to welcome some new starters and glad to see everyone was eager to come back to nursery to play and learn with their friends!