Happy Diwali!

We have reached the end of this half-term, and have had an exciting week. This week the children learned all about the Hindu celebration Diwali.

Diwali is the festival of lights and Hindus light candles and fireworks as part of their celebrations. The children enjoyed making some firework paintings using paints, glitter and glue. Here some lovely examples.

The children have also enjoyed making rangoli patterns using coloured pegs.

 The children have also enjoyed trying on saris and bindis to celebrate Diwali and in cooking made mango lassi drinks (mango blended with milk and yoghurt).

Here are some more photos of this week's learning.

Collecting and sweeping leaves.

 Floating scarves and parachutes in the wind.

Visiting year five's newly hatched chicks.

We have sent out a settling in sheet this week and would really like to hear how you feel your child has settled into their nursery class. Please write any comments on the sheet and hand them in after half-term, many thanks,

Coming up after half-term: Our new topic is Autumn & Winter, we will be doing lots of bonfire night activities and are looking forward to a visit from the Forest Hill fire fighters and the fire engine! Have a lovely break!

Road safety training and The Leopard's Drum

We have had another lovely week at Our Lady's Nursery. On Monday we had a visit from Vivienne (Southwark council), she taught  the children all about how to stay safe when crossing the road. We went outside to practice on our road in the Nursery outdoor area. The children did really well and answered questions like 'Why do we need to be careful?' 'What are we looking for at the side of the road?' 'What vehicles are we listening for?'

The children decided to put all this into practice when they used road signs to stop bike traffic in the outdoor area.

The children have loved hearing the Asante tale The Leopard's Drum; Osebo the leopard has a fine drum, a huge drum, a magnificent drum. He won't share it with anyone, not even Nyame, the Sky-God. So Nyame offers a big reward to the animal that brings him the drum. All try but fail. But a very small tortoise succeeds and decides as a reward she would like a hard shell to protect her from careless animals treading on her- and that is how the tortoise got her shell. 

Source: Google Books. 

To follow on the theme we set up a small world play area with African animals and books about Africa, the children have loved making their own drums by fillings cups with dried pasta, lentils and tapioca. We also made African inspired masks.

The children have been developing their fine motor skills whilst making jam or honey sandwiches.

This week we added the finishing touches to our outside builder's role play area, we have added construction site signs, building plans and more bricks & tools for our budding builders to use.

Coming up next week: The children will be learning about Diwali- the festival of light and we will be going on our first trip! Don't forget we break up for half-term on Thursday 23rd October (Friday 24th is a Staff INSET day and the school will be closed to children).

Faces and feelings

* Sorry about the delay on this week's post, I have had problems with my internet connection.

This week the children have been learning about feelings. We have had lots of discussions about feelings and why different events make us feel differently.

The children have enjoyed looking at photographs of faces and trying to guess which emotion the person was feeling, we have also used emotion pebbles (pebbles with faces painted on) to discus feelings.

Here are some great examples of happy/sad faces the children have made using card, wool, sticky eyes and lolly sticks.

The children have given some great responses to our feeling discussions this week, here are some of our favourites:
"Feelings is when you are happy or sad." "You might get scared if you see a storm." "You will be sad if you have noone to play with." "I feel happy when I play with my little sister." 

This week's cooking activity was rice cake faces; the children used raisins to make eyes and a nose and cheese to make hair!

The children also participated in a senses activity, we filled bottles with lots of different smells and asked the children to take a sniff and guess what it was. The bottles were filled with perfume, vanilla essence, lemon juice, bubble bath and vinegar.

The children have loved learning about shapes last week so we decided to continue this and set up some more activities using shapes. Activities included:

 Shape printing.

 Making shape books (also developing cutting skills).

 Sorting shapes.

 Connecting shapes.

Here are some more photos of other things we have been up to this week. 

 Fishing for ducks.

 Painting.

 Ribbon streamers in the wind.

 Practicing pencil grip. 

 Small world knights & wizard's castle.

House playdough mats. 

Coming up next week: Road safety training with Southwark council (on site). Children will also be learning about Africa through the traditional Ashanti tale The Leopard's Drum.