The children have all settled into the new term happily in Nursery showing confidence to try new activities and to recall more familiar ones such as our fun music lessons with Miss Norford. We have been singing lots of the children’s favourite songs from the Pre-Prep Song Box including Wind the Bobbin Up, Five Little Monkeys, Snap Dragon and Jingle Bells! They have also been listening to different tempos to play musical statues and exploring the sounds of the claves and tambourines to make musical patterns.

In the Nursery classroom, the children have been enjoying lots and lots of painting with different colours, lovely imaginative role-play in the home corner with the baby dolls, rolling and shaping the play-dough and playing with the princesses and knights in the castle. The dressing-up costumes have been out in force, from superheroes to unicorns! The children have loved doing Paw Patrol puzzles, showing amazing thinking skills in joining all the pieces together. There has also been some beautiful artwork created on our CTouch board. In the garden, the children have loved riding the bikes and pushing the baby dolls in their buggies as well as climbing on the large play equipment and balancing on the garden wall.

We said a big thank you to Mr Phil who collected all our toys which have been over the other side of the fence for a long time! We are going to try really hard to keep all the toys in the Nursery garden from now on. Mr Phil also took us for a fire drill practice to our special Nursery sign on the playground - we are now all ready for when we have a fire drill practice with Main School.

In the Pre-Prep assembly we welcomed all the new children to Russell House and the children who have moved up to new classes too. Our Special Leaf for our Growing and Learning Tree was given for settling in so well into Nursery life at Russell House.

We all went on a nature hunt to find some tiny leaves and beautiful red berries to make some ice ornaments for the garden! We carefully put the leaves and berries into our bowls and poured water onto the top. We left them overnight to freeze but the weather was not cold enough so when we came in on Thursday there was still water and no ice! So we are going to try again this evening so fingers crossed we will have some photos on next week's bulletin!

We were all so excited to see a sprinkling of snow on Thursday! We all had a lovely time making footprints in the icy snow and then used the brooms and the diggers to sweep and scrape it into piles. We were lucky to have a train enthusiast who was keeping an eye on the icy conditions on the rail tracks by peering over the fence - luckily the trains were running smoothly today! We also loved playing with the penguins in the snow sliding them around and trying to balance them on the ice which was very tricky! We also went for a play on the pirate ship where the children had great fun finding treasure to give to the pirates! The children are learning to line up behind one another so we are ready to look like the older children when we walk around the school - this is quite tricky when everyone is keen to be at the front!

As we had seen the sparkly snowflakes in the garden, we thought we would like to make our own. So we chose different colours of pom poms to stick onto a sticky snowflake shape - we hope you all like them as much as we do! We are looking forward to our story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where I am sure there will be lots of porridge oats everywhere!