The children have loved listening to the story of Mouse and Bear finding their way to the moon using mouse’s Marvellous Moon Map. They drew some wonderful maps of their favourite places including a walrus seaside, a garden map and a map of a town! They then looked at a globe and Google Earth to find places including Africa, Germany and Russell House School.

We saw the Nursery garden, the car park and the roads and trains near the school, so we then created a wonderful small world using tracks, bricks and lots of vehicles! The children spent so much time using fantastic thinking skills to create the road for the cars, buses and fire engines and the longest train track with bridges for the engines and carriages.

The bricks were used to create a town with a toys shop and parking for the bus and cars - what a busy creative time! The children wanted to carry on adding to the train track after our snacks and we all decided to leave it out for the children to play with in the afternoon too!

We have been looking at road maps and deciding what we can see including motorways, rivers, parks, the sea  and farms. The children then carefully cut around pictures of different vehicles and put them onto the map where they thought they should be - submarines and boats in the sea and planes and helicopters flying across the roads and fields.

There was a lot of lovely imaginative play with the small world astronauts, space vehicles and aliens in the sparkly moon dust. The children counted down from 10 to 1 and blasted the rocket and spaceships into space! They also loved using tweezers to find aliens in the bowl of coloured rice. There was some lovely counting to see how many aliens they could find.

There was great excitement when the children iced and decorated a moon cake on Wednesday. Of course, there was a lot of sticky dripping icing and sprinkles everywhere. The children were so careful in choosing which of the tiny stars and gold and silver balls to put onto the icing - we hope you enjoyed a taste too!

Also on Wednesday, we were lucky enough to be treated to a gymnastics display by some of the older children in Main School. And WOW they were absolutely amazing! We were all so impressed by their gymnast skills of individual and group displays. All the Nursery children were so excited and gave them all a big clap after each performance and they can’t wait to be able to do gymnastics too, when they are older.

Our Special Leaf this week was presented in the Nursery class and it was awarded for super recognition of 2D shapes and amazing cutting skills to make a rocket. It is so lovely to see another leaf on our Learning and Growing Tree.

We haven’t had time to try on our costumes yet, but we thought you would like a sneak peek of the children who practised on the stage this week. The singing and acting is amazing, so we hope they are singing along at home too!

We thought it would be a lovely idea to make a boat just like Bear and Mouse in the story. So the children used wax crayons on the paper to make it water-resistant and, with our help, folded, flattened and pressed the paper into different shapes and created boats. The children then decided they wanted to see if the boats would float in the water... and they did! There was a lot of blowing too to make the boats travel across the water. We then dried them off and took them home to play with in the bath.

As the children have loved looking at maps this week, we thought it would be a lovely idea to borrow the Bee Bots from Form 2. These are battery-operated bees which have directional arrows on them, so the children had lots of fun making them move forwards, backwards and from side to side too. They used great building skills to create tunnels and bridges for them to travel under and through, making another map using different resources.

Next week, we begin the big Christmas countdown with our story of Aliens Love Panta Claus! And we have heard through the grapevine that we may be putting up the Christmas tree in Nursery too!