Horley Nursery - A Toad Hall Day Nursery in Horley

In butterflies we have enjoyed exploring our hungry caterpillar story over the last few weeks
We have had alot of wonderful learning opportunities during this time, including the life cycle of butterflies and talking about different foods, counting and developing our understanding of change over time. This will pf course continue as our chrysalises turns into a beautiful butterfly 🦋

As part of our Cook and Grow programme, in preschool we have been growing our own strawberries.
We carefully planted them in recycled milk bottles and have been looking after them by making sure they were well watered.
We have been very patient while waiting for the strawberries to grow, commenting on how big they were getting and noticing the changing colours.
Today, it was finally time to pick them, and we harvested a total of 10 strawberries! 🍓
We are so proud of our home-grown fruit and excited to enjoy the results of all our hard work. 🍓🌱

Today, we had a wonderful time creating our own colourful butterflies using coffee filters, pipe cleaners, washable pens, and water.
We carefully decorated the coffee filters with bright colours before adding water and watching the colours blend and spread to create beautiful wing patterns.
Once the filters had dried, we used pipe cleaners to shape and assemble their butterflies, bringing our unique creations to life.
This fun activity encouraged creativity, colour exploration, and the development of fine motor skills while sparking lots of conversations about butterflies.

Following on from making bird houses for father's day stay and play. We enjoyed exploring a selection of bird themed books also playing with the bird houses and puppets. We even created our very own birds during a creative activity. These experiences encouraged us to develop our imagination, communication and understanding of the natural world while extending our interest in birds and nature.

In Owls, we have been continuing to extend our knowledge of letters and words through fun, hands-on activities 🍏🍌🍊🥒 This week, we enjoyed matching letters to different fruits and vegetables, helping us to develop our letter recognition, vocabulary, and early literacy skills in an engaging way.

Today in butterflies we enjoyed a fun fruit cutting activity inspired by the very hungry caterpillar book. We explored a variety of fruits. Developing our fine motor skills and hand eye coordination while making learning fun. We spoke about the different colours, smells and tastes encouraging language development. We all showed great concentration as we recreated some of the caterpillars favourite food and enjoyed tasting the fruit together.

In Hedgehogs we have been looking at our reflections in the mirror and finding our own pictures.
When we look at our reflections we begin to recognise ourself as individuals. This is a process that gradually helps develop a sense of self and personal identity which is very important from a young age.
This also helps build self awareness, emotional understanding and helps us build a healthy relationship with others.

Hedgehogs have been enjoying looking at there family wall as its beginning to take shape!
Don't forget to send in your family photos through email so we can add them to the collection!

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The rain doesn't stop our little gardeners from making our garden become beautiful and colourful. Today we have been planting our tomato plants and reviving ones we already had! We all had discussions about what colour our tomatos might be, how big we think they will be and how long we think its going to take for them to grow. Our little gardeners love planting different fruits and vegetables in our garden. We will update you all on our fruit and vegetable growing journey in preschool!