This Week in Woodlands

I hope you are feeling as though both you and your children are settling into the Lent Term now – the Woodlands Team certainly feels that we are getting to know your children better or even better!  There is so much fun and new learning happening in Woodlands and I encourage you to find the time to open up all your Tapestry notifications to see how your children spend their days with us.

Looking ahead we have several opportunities for families to come into Woodlands to find out more about what a Beechwood Nursery experience looks like:

• We have two  ‘Special Adults In The House’ events coming up on both Thursday 26 January and Tuesday 7 February. Please book your preferred slot through Louise Lynes.
• We are also running our popular ‘Stay and Play’ session on Friday 3 March from 0900. This is our opportunity to show potential Woodlands families what goes on in our Nursery. Please do feel free to invite any local friends with young children (18 months +) to visit us on this day – they can book their place here

We promote independence at Woodlands and this week in Orange Class the children have been taking up the challenge to do up their zips, ALL by themselves. We are so delighted by their efforts and perseverance. 

We are also learning about your children’s wonderful imaginations. This week we have created a dinosaur spaghetti swamp, been to the hospital to have ‘photos taken of our bones’ and sailed across the ocean with a pirate in her high heels! The children love to dress up to be able to tell stories with their friends and they get particularly excited when the adults are a key part of their drama. They often base their play on their first hand experiences or the tales they have heard from story books. We encourage and model lots of creative language, introducing theme-based vocabulary to extend the children’s learning. I wonder what we will be pretending to be next week… 

In Phonics this week, we have been teaching them the terms for different parts of a book. They have learnt ‘front cover, ‘back cover’, ‘author’ and ‘spine’. 

Like most children in Early Years settings, Woodlanders enjoy exploring the garden when there is ice around. They soon found out this week that hot water melts ice and enjoyed using spray bottles and other bottles to transfer hot water from the tap, to the ice in the garden. They also used spades and metal kitchen utensils to crack the ice on the toy cars and anything else they could find in the garden. They added paint to their melted ice water and created a concoction. They were engaged for a long period of time! 

In Green Class this week, they have been learning about aliens! Green Class are hoping for a few aliens to visit then for a special, alien tea party for which the children have written or drawn invitations. Their alien learning stemmed from a much-loved book about aliens in underpants! The children find this story hilarious….the aliens steal people’s underpants! The children used their old favourite, playdough,  to make some aliens – such a multisensory way to understand the concept of an alien. They added eyes, antennae, arms, legs and their aliens were crazy looking! The children then had the opportunity to put their IT skills to use as they used the iPads to take photos of their aliens for making our alien display gallery. 

Take a look at some photos from the week below:

In Music, we carried on this ‘crazy’ theme for all the N2 pupils when Shirley and Tracy taught them the nonsense chant called ‘Applesauce‘. At the end of their chanting, they love to cry out; ‘What a load of nonsense!’ 

Here are the words, so you can chant too:

“Criss cross applesauce

Hands on lap ginger snap

Back straight, choc shake

On my rear, root beer

Lips zipped, cool whip”

My final reminder is….Please name all your child’s belongings! 

As always, we thank you for letting your child be part of the Woodlands’ Family and remind you that we are here to work in partnership with you to strive to provide the best quality education and care for your young children. 

Happy weekend! 

Kind regards 

Shirley Hayman
Head of Woodlands Nursery

Notifications

From the Junior Librarians

There’s Nothing Faster than a Cheetah by Tom Nicoll

There’s Nothing Faster than a Cheetah is a riot of a book, packed with bright, bold illustrations and hilarious, simple text.

The challenge is simple; to find an animal that’s faster than a cheetah. However it’s really not an easy task, so the animals go to greater and greater lengths to gain speed,  deploying a whole manner of transportational modes with funny results.