345 Nursery School Balham

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We will be using to where continue sharing more about the children’s learning journey with us and our approach to education, joy and daily life across our three sites at Wandsworth, Balham and Hurlingham.

🎄✨ What a wonderful time we had at the Dew Drop In sessions with Balham Baptist Church! ✨🎄

Our children, their teachers, and Miss Leisa had an absolute blast singing and dancing during our Christmas sing-along! 🎤💃

The highlight of the day? The Big Kids surprised us all with an interactive performance of “12 Days of Christmas,” and we absolutely loved it! 🎅🎶

A huge thank you to Balham Baptist Church for having us. Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! 🎁❤️

The children have been loving our Outdoor Learning Days and extending our learning outside the classroom.

A couple of weeks ago the Squirrels at 345 Balham enjoyed one of our classroom activities where they threaded beads to create necklaces and bracelets. So, we decided to take this idea on our Outdoor Learning Day, where we extended our maths learning and developed the muscles in our hands.

The children were given the challenge of searching for and collecting numbers 1-13 before putting them in order, hole punching them and then threading them in order to make jewellery!

The children had a lot of fun during this activity and it was great to see them working together.

This week the Squirrels have been learning about the senses.

To help extend our learning and to explore the different smells further we played a taste game where the children were given little pieces of foods to try. The challenge was that they could hold and smell the food but had to keep their eyes closed whilst trying the food items!

If they really didn’t like the food after taking a bite they could put the small piece of food in the bin. We were so proud of the children for trying everything including: onion, radish, garlic, olives, carrot, tomato, blueberries, avocado and dates.

Surprisingly the least favourite were olives! Everyone ate a tiny piece of garlic and a small piece of radish and more was requested. 90% of the class ate the onion with some wanting more for snack!

Well done Squirrels! 🐿️

The Kits have been learning all about Diwali this week and everyone loved taking part in a range of activities related to the festival of light.

They strengthened their hand muscles whilst making a diya lamp from clay and practised their pincer grip by adding jewels to their lamps.

The Kits learnt lots of new vocabulary throughout this week and it opened up great conversations about the different celebrations we have and how we prepare for them with our families.

The Kits have also enjoyed learning about Autumn and observing the changes to our environment. Before half term one of our topic stories was ‘We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt’.

The children learned about the Autumn season by observing the different coloured leaves and talking about how animals prepare for the winter by collecting lots of food.

On our Community Walk this week we observed the different coloured leaves we could find. We looked at the trees around us and at leaves that had fallen from the branches. The children spotted some red, green, yellow, brown, and some with yellow speckles on them.

In the Outdoor Learning Environment the Kits loved making leaf soup using several pots, water, scoops, and leaves, stirring and transferring their soup from one pot to another. The Kits also used magnifying glasses to observe all the natural objects with bugs in the tuff tray. We discussed where conkers come from while adding the conkers and pine cones to the small containers. The children then practised counting how many they had found.

Last week we had a wonderful Autumnal time in the Squirrels classroom. Our book of the week was The Leaf Thief and in the story we found out about a squirrel who was confused where all the leaves were disappearing to from his tree. He thought the leaves were being stolen by the other animals until he realised it was Autumn. No one was stealing the leaves at all but they were in fact being carried away by the wind.

In our Circle Time conversations we discussed the various changes Autumn brings such as a change in weather and various animals going into hibernation. In Art we made pictures using leaves we had collected on our Outdoor Learning Day last week and we painted leaves to print and create our own Autumnal tree.

Have you noticed any changes around you this week?

Our Topic Story last week in the Kits classroom was ‘Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear?’ And we enjoyed taking part in a range of animal themed activities throughout the week.

The Kits loved getting messy and exploring the Gloop and penguins, where the children practised identifying colour, counting the penguins and also feeling the texture. They also explored flour and other materials with sea animals in the tuff tray.

In our Art activity, the children worked on their hand muscles by using a peg attached to a pom pom to make different marks and prints on the animal.

The Kits particularly loved using one handed tools to rescue the sea animals in ice. The children used hammers and other tools too.

A huge highlight of the term was celebrating our Bring Grandparents to School Day.

The Squirrels spent the week preparing for their arrival by making blueberry muffins and in Literacy the children wrote things they like to do with their grandparents with every child giving a unique answer from blowing bubbles with them to having them look after them when their parents are out.

Finally at the end of the week we were able to welcome the Grandparents in and the Squirrels loved showing them around the classroom and taking part in lots of activities with them.

Thank you to everyone who could join us!

This week the Squirrels have had a brilliant week with lots of fun activities and events including fundraising for Mary’s Meals and celebrating Grandparents Day.

Another highlight was our Outdoor Learning Day where the focus was on getting messy and making yummy treats!

Some of the children do not like getting mucky hands or if they do, they want to wash them straight away. With this in mind last week we took some items from the outdoor kitchen.

This included spoons which naturally many of the children used to scoop up mud. This week we adapted the same activity. We did not take spoons this week and instead encouraged the children to pick up the mud with their hands AND wait until it was time to leave the common before cleaning them.

Initially some of the children cleverly used the pots and pans to scoop up the mud but with a little encouragement everyone got their hands mucky to various degrees. We had a great time, even creating a kitchen amongst the trees and foliage. We were very proud of the children for embracing their muddy hands.