Chiddingstone Nursery School CIO

22/11/2024

🌟 This Week at Preschool 🌟

This week, our book of the week was Oliver’s Vegetables, sparking plenty of veggie-themed fun! 🥕🌽

🍲 In the Kitchen: We got busy making a delicious vegetable soup—perfect for warming us up on these chilly days! The children loved exploring the colours, textures, and smells of the different vegetables.

🎨 Veggie Art: The children had a fantastic time doing vegetable printing! They dipped slices of carrots and potatoes into paint to create beautiful patterns and shapes.

❄️ Science in Action: Investigating ice turned into an exciting adventure! We had fascinating discussions about solids, liquids, and gases, as the children observed the melting and refreezing process.

🌳 Woodland Walks: We embraced the season with plenty of walks in the woods, enjoying the fresh air and exploring the changing environment.

🌌 Creative Play: The orangery became a magical stage for shadow puppet fun! The children experimented with light and shadow, creating their own stories and characters.

💡 Learning Idea for Home: Why not set up a veggie treasure hunt? Gather a mix of vegetables, hide them around the house or garden, and give your little one clues to find them. Once they’ve discovered all the veggies, chat about their shapes, sizes, and names—or even use them to make a healthy snack together!

15/11/2024

📅 Another Week of Fun and Learning! 🎨🥁🌞

This week has flown by in a flurry of activities! We began with painting poppies in honour of Remembrance Day, allowing us to reflect and create some beautiful artworks.

Our Book of the Week, Rufus and the Blackberry Monster, was a big hit! Through Rufus’s adventures, we learned all about facing our fears—and, of course, we had to follow it up by making our own delicious apple and blackberry crumbles!

With such glorious weather, we took our learning outdoors for a drumming session in the woods, using sticks to keep rhythm with a fun song. The children loved drumming to the beat surrounded by nature!

We also started working on our Christmas show, creating props and filming some of the scenes. Mark your calendars for December 9th in the morning, when our little stars will bring this festive story to life on screen. More details will be shared soon, so stay tuned!

To keep the fun going at home, why not try a nature rhythm activity with your little ones? Head outside and find sticks or small stones, then try tapping different surfaces (like a table, a fence, or even a pot) to make unique sounds. You can play their favourite song and let them experiment with keeping the beat!

08/11/2024

🌟 This Week’s Highlights at Preschool 🌟

🎇 Firework Painting with Straws
This week, we created colourful firework pictures by printing with cut up straws! The children enjoyed experimenting with colours and making unique patterns.

Extend at home: Try using toothbrushes or cotton buds to create fun splatter effects on paper!

🧑‍🍳 Cheese and Marmite Wheels
Our little chefs made cheese and Marmite wheels, practicing fine motor skills and enjoying new flavours.

🚀 Rocket Launch Dance Party
We crafted rockets and zoomed them around the courtyard to lively music, sparking lots of imaginative play and movement.

💻 Online Firework Display
We watched a firework display online, safely bringing the excitement indoors with all the colours and sounds.

🎨 Salad Spinner Firework Art
Using a salad spinner, we made unique firework designs with paint. The children loved seeing the colours spin and mix!

✨ Sparkly Sand Patterns
Exploring patterns in sparkly sand was a fun way to practice mark-making and fine motor skills.

Extend at home: Use a tray with salt or flour for drawing shapes and letters. Add a sprinkle of glitter for some sparkle!

🌱 Seed Planting and Garden Time
We planted seeds and enjoyed the front garden, observing how nature changes with the season.

25/10/2024

🍁 Preschool Highlights: A Fun, Festive Week Before Half-Term Break! 🍂

This week was a cozy, quiet one as some of our friends are already off on holiday. We’ve had so much fun exploring the season and starting some Halloween festivities! 🎃✨

📚 Book of the Week: Leaf Man – We continued our focus on autumn, celebrating the changes we see all around us. 🍂 The children enjoyed a hands-on activity where we created a huge tree collage, filling it with warm autumnal decorations and colours!

🎃 Halloween Fun – The excitement for Halloween was in the air! We decorated two pumpkins 🎨🖌️ and made savoury pumpkin muffins 🧁 to enjoy together. Our little artists also created black play-dough spiders, counting out their legs for extra learning fun! 🕷️

🌲 Woodland Walks – On our walks, the children collected natural materials and got creative, making music with sticks, leaves, and rocks. 🎶 It was so wonderful to see them experimenting with sounds from nature.

🎉 We hope you all have a relaxing half-term break! Preschool will resume on 4th November – we can’t wait to hear all about your holiday adventures!

🌟 At-Home Activity Idea to Extend the Fun:

• 🕷️ Spider Web Hunt: Use masking tape to make a spider web on a door or wall and have your little one toss soft balls or paper “flies” into it.

Have a wonderful holiday, everyone!

18/10/2024

🎃 This week, we’ve gone pumpkin mad! 🎃

We kicked things off with The Happy Pumpkin, a seasonal story that taught us all about feeling left out. 💛 The children got creative with polystyrene pumpkins, painting and decorating to make their very own mini pumpkin patches. 🌱 They then extended their artistic skills by using various materials to create vibrant pumpkin collages. 🎨

Our mini chefs took to the kitchen, baking some beautiful pumpkin pies, dusted with cinnamon—delicious! 🥧✨

To keep appreciating autumn, we also explored nature through art, using scrunched-up tin foil and autumn-coloured paints to create stunning tree artwork. 🍂🌳

How can you extend the learning at home?

1. Decorate a pumpkin together—whether you carve, paint, or use stickers, it’s a fun way to explore creativity as a family! 🎨🎃

2. Take a listening walk with your child. As you stroll, listen for the wind, birds, and squirrels rustling in the hedges. It’s a great way to practice mindfulness and observation.

16/10/2024

11/10/2024

This Week at Preschool: Gruffalo Fun and Seasonal Creativity!

This week, our storybook focus was “The Gruffalo,” and it inspired so many exciting and hands-on activities!

• 🍪 We kicked things off by making a delicious and messy Gruffalo crumble with oats. The children loved getting their hands involved, measuring, mixing, and seeing how all the ingredients came together.
• 🧁 Our baking fun continued with Gruffalo cupcakes! Decorating them brought huge smiles to everyone’s faces, and the children were proud of their creations.
• 🐍 We had some sensory fun with our “scrambled snake” activity, using shaving foam. The children practiced scooping, pouring, and filling containers while exploring the foamy texture.
• 🎨 Inspired by the story’s monsters, we got creative with junk modelling. Using recycled materials like boxes, paper rolls, and lids, the children designed their own monsters, and their imaginations soared!
• ✂️ To extend the fun, the children also used shapes and stickers to create colourful monster designs on paper, practicing pattern recognition and creativity.
• 🍂 With the changing season, we embraced autumn by making autumn soup using natural materials like pine cones, oranges, and spices. The children explored seasonal scents and textures, sparking conversations about the smells and colours of autumn!
• 🎶 Finally, we had lots of movement and music time, dancing along to Danny Go and singing songs. We also had a big outdoor cleanup, where the children enthusiastically helped wash and organise our toys, learning about teamwork and responsibility.

Well done, everyone! 🎉

To extend the learning at home, here are some fun new ideas:
• 🍁 Autumn-Themed Sensory Tray: Set up a sensory tray using dried leaves, acorns, pinecones, and cinnamon sticks. Add toy animals to encourage imaginative play that explores textures and smells while building fine motor skills.
• 📖 Recipe Booklet: Encourage your child to create their own simple recipe booklet. Let them draw ingredients, explain steps, and make their own “recipes” for fun and creativity.
• 🌿 Nature Patterns: Go on a nature walk to collect leaves, twigs, and other autumn treasures. At home, create beautiful patterns or mandalas, exploring symmetry and early math concepts in a creative way.
• 💃 Family Dance Party: Keep the dancing fun going at home by hosting a family dance party! Play favourite songs and let your child create their own dance routines, building confidence and coordination.

These activities will help your child build on the skills and ideas we explored at preschool this week. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to more adventures next week! 😊

04/10/2024

📚 This Week’s Preschool Adventures! 🌿🐛

We had an exciting start to the week by taking our snack down to the woods, where the children loved finding bugs and collecting leaves. The highlight? An interesting leaf full of holes—our little explorers decided a very hungry caterpillar had munched through it! This sparked the idea for The Hungry Caterpillar to become our book of the week. 🦋

To bring the story to life, we made delicious fruit kebabs inspired by all the fruits the caterpillar eats. 🍏🍓🍉

The children got hands-on, creating caterpillar shapes using cardboard tubes and paint, practicing counting legs and body parts as they printed. 🎨

We even stretched out for some Caterpillar Yoga 🧘—using our bodies to mimic a wiggly caterpillar crawling along, which was a big hit!

With our collection of leaves, we made beautiful leaf wreaths, and the children enjoyed doing leaf rubbings with wax crayons and painting to create leaf prints.

The creativity and fun didn’t stop there—singing, laughter, and plenty of children’s choice activities filled our days. 🎶

For next week, the children have chosen The Gruffalo as our book, and we are excited to see what creations await!

Ideas for home learning:

• Fruit Fun: Try making fruit kebabs together at home and practice counting the pieces.
• Leaf Rubbings: Collect some leaves and try doing wax crayon rubbings for a lovely autumn craft.
• Caterpillar Creations: Use any materials like cardboard tubes or playdough to make your own caterpillar.

27/09/2024

🌈 Weekly Highlights 🌈

This week, we continued focusing on inclusion and diversity with our featured book, All Are Welcome. 📚 The children had a great time using different materials to create faces, celebrating all our unique differences! 🎨

We also got creative in the kitchen, decorating biscuits with various toppings to make edible faces – a fun and tasty activity everyone enjoyed! 🍪👶

Despite some short bursts of rain, we made the most of it with a weather-themed singing session and then designed our own umbrellas during a group activity – each one was as creative as the children! ☔️🌦

A heartfelt thank you to all the parents who attended our curriculum meeting! 🙏 Your engagement is so important to us.

At home: To continue the learning, encourage your child to draw or make a family portrait using different materials. Talk about what makes each person unique and special – it’s a wonderful way to build on our discussions of diversity! 🎨

We also have a Comments and Suggestions Box inside the nursery, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how we can keep improving our community! 📝💡

We can’t wait to see what next week has in store! 💕

20/09/2024

🌟 Weekly Highlights 🌟

This week, we continued discovering more about each other's families, including our pets. 🐾 We had a very special visit from Boscoe, one of our children's pet puppies, which gave us an exciting hands-on experience. The children loved measuring Boscoe, who stands at 47cm tall! We’ll check back in a couple of months to see how much he’s grown.

Following this, the children used vegetables and cocktail sticks to create their own animal models, letting their imaginations run wild. 🐢 This activity is easy to try at home—just gather some veggies and toothpicks and see what creative animals your child can build!

We also filled up our new bird feeder in the front garden and did some weeding, giving the children a chance to connect with nature. 🐦🌱

We practiced our fire drills this week, making sure the children know how to stay safe in an emergency. 🔥

Finally, we took our speaker into the woods for a lively sing-along, enjoying music together while embracing the outdoors. 🎶🌲

13/09/2024

🌟 This Week in Preschool: Celebrating Family! 🌟

This week, we focused on the wonderful theme of *family*. We shared stories about how many brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins we all have—it's been so fun getting to know more about each other! ❤️

Our creativity shone as we used wholewheat wraps to create our very own "pizza family," which made for a tasty and fun snack! 🍕
Our book of the week, *Owl Babies*, brought us comfort as we learned that just like the owl babies, our mummies always come back. 🦉 This inspired our clay crafting session where we made our very own owls using white clay, feathers, and leaves.

With the weather being so bright and crisp, we had the perfect opportunity for some exciting woodland adventures and lots of outdoor play. 🍂🌞

We ended the week with a special treat—a visit from Year 6! It was a wonderful time of connection and fun.

Thank you all for another amazing week! 🌈 Looking forward to next week's adventures!

06/09/2024

🌟 Welcome Back to Nursery! 🌟
What a fantastic first week back we have had after the six-week break! We have loved seeing our returning children and meeting all our wonderful new starters. The children have done an amazing job building friendships and settling into their new routines.

Our Book of the Week was *My First Day at Nursery School*, which helped everyone feel comfortable and excited about the days ahead. 📚

We got creative in the kitchen by using vegetables, knives, and peelers to make our own faces – a fun way to notice our similarities and differences alongside practicing those fine motor skills. 🥕🍅
Exploring the woods was another highlight, where we started to discover all the wonders nature has to offer. 🌳 And of course, no week is complete without plenty of singing, laughter, and smiles! 🎶😊

A HUGE thank you to Alex for building our new tuff trays in the courtyard. They are going to be such a fun addition to our outdoor space. The courtyard is still a work in progress, but we can’t wait for it all to come together for the children to enjoy!

We are so excited for the adventures ahead this term. Have a lovely weekend! 🌈