Calendar Dates
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Nursery
The Nursery Staff
The nursery staff would like to thank all the parents for their work and support this year and wish you all a very happy and warm summer holiday.
This term we have had some exciting events taking place. We celebrated The Queen's 90th birthday, raised over £65 for Barnados by completing The Toddle and harvested our fruit and vegetables for a big week of cooking. Below are just a few of those moments.
Welcome to the second half of the summer term.
Last half term the nursery started to look at Health and Sport as their theme as the children were inspired by Sport's Relief. This theme will continue with the kitchen garden and the Banardo's Toddle at the end of the year. We will also be looking at Transition to assist the children with their move to various reception classes in September. To support with this we are creating reception class role plays and arranging small group visits to the reception classes both here and at St. Francis.
We will also be setting up beach role plays outside which will not only support the children with language and imagination but will also assist with physical skills such as managing dressing and provide problem solving opportunities.
We are also planning to celebrate the Queen's 90th Birthday so please watch this space for the pictures.
At the end of May the children visited Handsworth Firestation where alongside looking at the safety aspect they were able to dress up as firemen, look around the fire engine, sit on the motorbike and see the emergency pole in action. They had a great day and the whole visit stimulated lots of activities around Commuication and Language, Literacy, Understanding of the World, and Expressive Arts and Design.
We have been home visiting all the new children for September and have really enjoyed meeting with familiar and new families. We will be writing to you again at the beginning of July to ask you in to nursery for a stay and play session where you will be able to meet the staff, fill in all the paper work and the children will have a chance to play with the other children in their key group.
Classes continue as usual in the Commuinity Room and we will be running the volunteer training and the early phonics project again in September as they have been so popular. We are also hoping to run
E.S.O.L. Classes for nursery parents next year.
As always you can find an overview of the nursery curriculum in "About Us". If you wish for any further information please call direct on 0121 464 4385 or come in and see us.
Community room activities -
Stay and Play - Tuesday mornings 9.00am-11.00am
Early Support Drop In -Thursday mornings 9.30 -11.30 every fortnight.
These sessions take place in the Community Room. Which is accessed via the main children's gate for reception and key stage one.
This week we harvested and tasted the spring onions. As we had a bumper crop this year the parents took the excess home to use with the family.
Welcome to the Summer Term
We hope you all enjoyed the break.
As you can see we had a short but very busy spring half term with World Book Day and Mother's Day activities. The end of last term also saw the children dressing up in sports clothes and donating their school fund to Sports Relief. We finished the term with an Easter Bunny hunt on the last day where the children had to search out Easter treats left by someone with suspiciously big feet.
The children were really enthusiastic about the sports event so we decided to make "Health and Sport" our theme this half term. With this we will be including growing and tasting foods from the kitchen garden, keeping our bodies fit, making healthy choices and completing a fun run for Barnados in the summer.
We know lots of you grow vegetables at home so please do share with us your ideas and successes.
Thank you to all of the parents who applied for the Volunteer training. We have been overwhelmed with applications. If you did not get a place on the course do not worry as we will be running it again in the summer.
We will also be running the Early Phonics Project for some families to share at home with their children.
Offers of nursery places for September 2016 are going out now. We will shortly be contacting families to arrange home visits to support with your induction process to the nursery, so please let us know of any change to your contact details.
If you still wish to apply or have not received a letter please call or drop into the nursery as soon as possible.
A brief overview of the nursery curriulum can be found in "About Us".
If you would like any more information please either call us directly on 0121 464 4385 or come in and see us. Parents are always welcome.
Community Room Activities
Tuesday 9.15-11.15. Stay and play. Spaces are available
Thursday 9.15-11.15. Early Support Drop In. Help is available regarding offers of school places.
Friday 9.00-11.00. Volunteer Training.
The Community Room can be accessed via the main entrance to the school, next to the ramp into the playground.
Today we celebrated World book Day by dressing up as characters from our favourite books. We also had a visit from The West End Theatre Company and we took part in with dance workshops on our focus book of The Ginger Bread Man. As usual the staff also joined in with the dressing up fun.
We also made small bunches of flowers for the children to present to their mum's on Mother's Day.
Welcome back to the second half of the spring term.
We hope you had a good break.
Last half term the nursery participated in a collaboration with The Symphony Hall and the Town Hall (TSTH) called Sound Bounce. We had two professional musicians called Sara and Natalie who worked with the children on a project about a penguin called Parinda. Parinda travelled via different means to hot, cold and imaginary countries improvising with songs and instruments as she went. The children got really involved and explored new instruments such as the viola, the piano, the concertina, the xylophone and even a slap organ.
The children's imagination was really stimulated and all the activities were linked to early phonic skills to support the children's learning.
We will be continuing with the topic of Our Community as the children are very interested in this theme and it links to so many areas. Last half term we went on walks in the community looking for writing and letters to identify and and later we went on number and shape hunts. The weather has prevented us from visiting the local building site but we hope to visit it shortly.
We are changing our role plays areas to a health centre and a kitchen garden snack bar, and we will be going out to visit local examples during the first week to support the play. Outside we are having a garden centre and a 3 bear's house, again linking to our theme and also the children's enthusiasm for the Goldilocks story.
We hope to begin indoor planting and some work again on our own kitchen garden soon, weather permitting, though cooking and tasting has gone on with our winter vegetables. As always please do let us know if you would like to join in.
Thank you to all the families that joined in with the Talking Tips programme and Promoting Happier Parenting. We have had some really good feedback from you. Also thank you to all the parents who attended the wellbeing consultation meetings and for returning your forms.
This half term we will be running a course for volunteer training and also a group of families will be invited to share in an early phonics project both at home and at nursery.
As always you can find an overview of the nursery curriculum in "About Us". If you would like any more information please either call us directly on
0121 464 4385 or come in and see.
Community room activities,
Tuesday 9.15 - 11.15am - Stay and Play
Thursday 9.30 -11.30am - Early Support Drop In
The community room can be accessed via the main entrance to the school next to the ramp into the playground.
Happy New Year and welcome to the first term of 2016
We hope you had a great holiday.
The nursery celebrated Christmas at the end of last term with lots of Christmas activities such as card making, writing and sharing and also a big end of term party with a visit from Santa himself!
The children really enjoyed the games, dancing, dressing up, meeting Father Christmas and of course the gifts he brought with him.
We would like to thank you for your kind gifts and presents as well.
Following on from last half term's topic of Television Favourites we have decided to look at the topic of Our Community this term as this covers many areas that the children are currently showing an interest in - for example, transport, people working in the community, our continuing gardening project and notably the building project that has just begun on Church St. to build five new houses. This is bringing many interesting people and machines right next to the school - just right for investigation.
The role plays were very successful last half term so we have swapped them into different classes to give all of the children an opportunity to experience them and visit the garage or bakery in the local community. Outside we have tree house role plays so the children can travel between the two areas
As mentioned in the previous blog we will be working again with Sound Bounce. These are two professional musicians funded by a partnership with The Town Hall and The Symphony Hall to run a series of workshops with young children. This years project is about a bird who uses various types of transportation to travel to different places and experiences. It involves exploring lots of instruments and exploring improvisation. Watch this space for photos as we go.
We are continuing with the upkeep of the kitchen garden and noticing the changes over the year. Due to the mild weather we are also still harvesting lettuces and cabbages etc and tasting the efforts of our labour. Again if anyone is interested in helping out please let us know
Thank you for all your support with the hand writing and letter formation meetings and your continuing input daily. This term we will be running some longer courses for parents to help support your children and have fun and learn yourselves. We will let you know about these nearer the time but it will include Talking Tips and Play and Language.
As always you can find an overview of the nursery curriculum in " About Us ". If you wish for any further information please call direct on 0121 464 4385 or come in and see us.
Community room activities -
Stay and Play - Tuesday mornings 9.15am - 11.30 am
Early Support Drop In - Thursday mornings 9.30 am
These sessions take place in the community room which is accessed via the main children's gate for reception and key stage one
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Welcome to the second half of the autumn term.
All of the children are settled into nursery now and we would like to thank our parents for their ongoing support during this time of transition.
During the last half term the children had the opportunity to explore the nursery and all of the new activities on offer. This included the nursery kitchen garden. We harvested the summer crop of carrots, courgettes, marrows (grown by accident as the courgettes were left too long during the summer break), and onions. We still have a crop of spinach and coriander to pick and we have planted our winter crop of leeks, cabbages, cauliflowers, kohl rabi, celeriac and purple broccoli.
As you can see the children really enjoyed the experience, dressing in the gardening clothes, digging, planting and watering. This single activity has provided many learning opportunities across the seven areas of the Early Years Curriculum.
This project will continue as the year progresses with further planting, weeding, watering and harvesting and will be developed into cooking and tasting activities.
We would love parents to be involved in the gardening and cooking sessions so if you are interested in joining in please mention this to your key worker
Our next topic is Children's TV and Movie Favourites as the children are talking about these characters and adding them to their play - notably superheroes. We will be planning many activities around this and also stimulating some new play ideas in the form of our role plays for the inside classroom.
We are visiting the local bakery and garage in small groups and we will be using these experiences to set up our own bakery/garage within the inside classrooms.We will be posting pictures shortly.
We will be sending home books to share together every Wednesday. Please keep these books for one week and return every Wednesday to choose a new one.
We have been fortunate to be offered another collaboration with the Symphony Hall who will be delivering a musical project called Sound Bounce in the nursery. We will let you know more about this project in future blogs.
Even though it is getting colder it is really important that the children continue to fully use the outside classroom as so much learning takes place there. We go out in all weathers but ensure that the children are suitably dressed.
You can find an overview of the nursery curriculum in " About Us "
If you wish for any further information please call direct on 0121 464 4385 or come in and see us.
Stay and play - Tuesday mornings 9.15am -11.30am
Early Support Drop In - Thursday Mornings 9.30am - 11.30am
These sessions take place in the community room which is accessed via the main children's gate for reception and key stage one.
Hello. Just to let you know about some of the things we have been doing this week in nursery. On Wednesday we celebrated Diwali - the Hindu and Sikh festival of light, by painting Rangoli Patterns.
We have also joined in with Children In Need fund raising by bringing in a coin and dressing up as our favourite superhero.
The staff joined in too.
Thank you to all the parents for your support. We raised £86.49.
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Welcome to the new academic year 2015/16
It is the exciting start of another new year and we would like to welcome all the new children and parents.We would also like to congratulate Mrs and Mr Mitcham on the birth of their beautiful baby daughter Aria and hope to see them both for a nursery visit shortly. We would like to welcome Miss Neelam Gill to the nursery team who will be taking over room 2 this year while Mrs Mitcham is on maternity leave.
The nursery has been redecorated over the summer break and now has a new fresh appearance.
This half term we will be admitting all of the new children. The start dates are staggered to enable children to settle in with their key worker and have the best possible start. We value your support during this time which can be both an exciting and challenging experience for very young children. We welcome parents to stay and help settle their children. We also have a take home Beat Baby which is a soft cuddly toy to pass between home and school and helps to build a strong link and secure base on which to start.
This year we are very fortunate to have a parents/community room attached to the nursery and hope you will take full advantage of this and the services that will be on offer. Some of these services will commencing at the end of September and will include stay and play sessions,early support drop in, parental support such as the terrific twos training, support with adopting healthy lifestyles and possibly E.S.O.L.and literacy classes. We will let you know more details about these activities as they come on line.
Our topic for this half term will be Settling In and as usual we will be planning our activities around the children's interests. We will also be completing our entry baseline assessments in order to plan appropriate next steps for your child and inviting you in for consultations to share this information and support with it. The best results are always achieved when school and home work together!
The kitchen garden will require some tidying after the summer break and the children will be planting their autumn crop. We would welcome any support from parents with this venture. If you are interested please let a member of staff know and we will arrange suitable times.
During this term we will be placing photos of nursery activities and additional information on this site so please do check in regularly. Alternatively if you require any further information come in and speak to us or call 0121 4644385 to reach the nursery directly
An overview of the nursery curriculum can be found in 'About Us'
Thank you
Early support drop in will begin on Thursday 17th September at 9.30 - 11-30 am
Stay and play will be on Tuesday between 9.30 -11.30 am each week staring from Tuesday 29th September 2015