Apple Tree Montessori Nursery School, Saltdean

📚✨ World Book Day ✨📚

Today we celebrated World Book Day by sharing our favourite stories and characters. The children loved dressing up, listening to stories, and exploring different books together.

Reading helps to build language, imagination, and a lifelong love of books — and today was full of excitement and storytelling! 📖💫

Our children have continued expanding their learning around our “All About Me” topic today, exploring what makes each of us unique and special.

We began by cutting and sorting pictures of things we like and dislike. This encouraged lots of lovely conversations as the children confidently shared their preferences, listened to their friends’ ideas and celebrated how we can all enjoy different things – and that’s okay! ✂️💬

Next, we created self-portraits on paper plates. The children carefully thought about their features, looking closely at themselves and adding details to represent who they are. It was wonderful to see their concentration and pride as they designed their own special faces 🎨🖍️

Later in the day, we introduced the 5 senses. Through discussion and hands-on learning, the children explored how we use our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hands to understand the world around us. To bring our learning together, we created our very own Mr Potato Head, carefully adding each feature and talking about which sense it represents 👀👂👃👄✋

A fantastic day full of creativity, communication and confidence building – celebrating what makes each and every one of us unique 💛

As part of our new topic “All About Me”, the children have been creating their very own eyes using collage materials 🎨

The children carefully selected colours to match their own eye colour, using glue and tissue paper to design the iris and adding details around the outside. They showed fantastic concentration, sitting so intently as they placed each piece with care — developing their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination along the way.

What was especially lovely to see was how they supported one another 🥰 The children helped their friends by talking about eye colours, telling each other “Your eyes are blue!” or “Mine are brown!” This encouraged lots of discussion about our similarities and differences, building confidence and awareness of what makes us unique.

We are so proud of how engaged and thoughtful they were throughout this activity. Celebrating our individuality is such an important part of our nursery community 💛

Happy Valentine’s Day ! 💌
Love from our little ones at Apple Tree 🩷

Our little ones have been exploring The Colour Monster 💛💙❤️💚🖤

The children have been learning to identify and name different emotions, understand that it’s okay to feel all kinds of feelings, and begin to talk about how emotions affect us.

Through stories, play, and discussion, they’re developing emotional awareness, empathy, confidence, and communication skills 💬💖

Our older children have also been busy practicing their pen grip and early writing skills, using mark-making and drawing to represent the Colour Monster and his feelings ✍️🎨 This helps build fine motor skills, hand strength, focus, and early literacy, all while linking learning to emotions in a fun and meaningful way.

Big feelings, busy hands, and lots of colourful learning happening every day 🌈✨

Our Rising Fives have been busy little learners, practising their writing skills and sounding out the letters in their names. Such a big step in their learning journey! 🌟✍️

🎄Christmas has arrived at our nursery!🎄

The children have been busy getting into the festive spirit this week — creating beautiful decorations, exploring sparkly sensory trays, and helping us turn the nursery into a cosy winter wonderland. ❄️✨

We’ve loved seeing their creativity shine through every bauble, snowflake and sprinkle of glitter! ❤️

Keep an eye out over the next couple of weeks as we continue our Christmas activities, crafts and celebrations. It’s truly the most magical time of the year, and we’re so excited to share it with our little ones. 🌟

Today we had a visit from some very special people. The police spoke about how they keep our community safe and how to call for them in an emergency. 🚨 👮