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This week at Nursery 20th June 2025

What a wonderful week at Buckingham primary Nursery; the children have had so much fun exploring and learning with their friends. We had the opportunity to go and watch a little bit of the school sports day on Wednesday. It was exciting for the children listening to the DJ and watching the races. They did a super job cheering on the teams.
The weather has been very hot this week. We have all thoroughly enjoyed playing in the water and using the hosepipe or splashing in the paddling pool. This weather is set to continue, please refer back to the Famly message I sent about appropriate clothing and ensuring that your child comes to nursery with sun cream already applied and with a hat and water bottle. Also, please do return any borrowed nursery clothes, thank you.
It was Molly’s last day with us today – we wish her every happiness and success with her next adventures and thank her for being a part of our nursery.

 

What a fun week we've had in the Chicks room. Despite the incredibly hot weather this week, we've done a great job of managing to keep cool with lots of water play. Our new paddling pool has been a huge hit with all the children, who have thoroughly enjoyed splashing around in the water. Some of the children have discovered that throwing the balls into the pool is great fun too when they make a big splash. 

Inside we have been learning all about trains this week. The children have been very interested in pushing the trains around the wooden track and have all become experts in how to take the track apart too! We created a sensory train track too with several different textures for the children to explore different textures and sounds when they pushed the trains around. 

 

This week in the Cygnets we have been super busy. With the weather being warm and sunny the children have loved being outside. We have had the paddling pool out with lots of bubbles which the children have enjoyed transporting the bubbles to a tuff tray. The children's favourite thing to do was making big splash and playing in the sprinkler to cook them down. We also have an ice cream parlour and the children have loved selling ice cream.

At the start of the week the children made their own lollies using Greek yoghurt and raspberries. Using their fine motor skills, the children cut up their raspberries using a knife and scooped them up to put them in the bowl. They then gave it a really good mix and put it in the yoghurt pot to put in the freezer. Once they were all frozen the children enjoyed having them for pudding at lunch to cool them down. Later on during the week the children painted their own ice lollies using corks to make patterns and then sprinkles to sprinkle on top, they looked very yummy!

 

Ahoy there! We have been having lots of pirate adventures this week. The children have been walking the plank, practicing their balancing, jumping and landing skills.

There have been pirate songs and the children have been talking like pirates too. We have been digging for treasure in the sand and sailing a ship with small world pirates on board in our water tray. The children have made telescopes so that they can look for pirates around Nursery. On Thursday morning the children found a letter pinned to the Swans’ room door from some pirates and were very surprised to find all of our toys had disappeared! The pirates had been playing with the toys and thought they would have some fun by hiding them and leaving us a treasure map to help us to find them all. We followed our map and thankfully we found all of our toys, then the children helped to put them back in the right places. The children have also drawn their own treasure maps, we wonder what they might find? Finally, we have made a card to say goodbye to Molly and let her know how much we will all miss her.

 

In Pre-School this week the children have been very busy learning about people who help us. We have had great discussions about this including the people who help us in school and at home and looked at a range of photos to support our new language acquisition.

Our maths learning this week was to understand the concept of a half and ‘half’ was our word of the week. We had two very greedy monsters who liked to share fairly; the children became experts at giving them half of a range of monster food from flowers to planets and then checking that each monster had a fair share. With the weather being so hot, we have spent plenty of time under the shade of the huge oak tree in our natural area and water play has obviously been super fun! Our phonics learning continues beautifully with some work on environmental sounds, voice sounds and instrumental sounds. As always, the children have listened beautifully and demonstrated good understanding. Well done Pre-School – a really great effort in during a hot and sticky week!

 

This week at Nursery

13th June 2025

Another wonderful week at Buckingham Primary Nursery has flown by. The children have been really busy this week with a wide range of activities and events ranging from a trip to the post box (to post a birthday card for the King!) to finding cars in amongst cloud dough! Lots of fun has been had by everyone and as always, we have been proud of our children’s positivity and care for each other with the children helping each other and working together to achieve their goals – well done everyone!
There are some special cards coming home this weekend to give to some very special people; we wish you all a peaceful and happy weekend.

We have had another wonderful week in the Chicks room. As the children had so much fun last week, we have continued our topic of cars into this week too. We have been busy washing our toy cars outside in the sunshine throughout the week, using bubble water and some cloths - it was great fun to splash around in the water too! The children have continued developing their fine motor skills this week, using the crayons to make marks with and design their own cars. On Friday we created a big sensory tuff tray filled with cloud dough and lots of cars hidden inside. The children had a fantastic time feeling the different texture, squishing the dough in their hands and discovering the cars too. We have also been very busy creating some lovely cards for our special people on Father’s Day, we hope you like them!

 Outside this week the children have showed some great teamwork, working together to build towers with the foam blocks which are great fun to knock down as well! It has also been fascinating to watch lots of our bunting blowing around in the wind this week and spotting noisy planes and helicopters too. 

 

This week in Cygnets we have been talking about holidays and playing on the beach. We have been really pleased with the children’s efforts to communicate with us about their holidays – thank you for sending in holiday photos to support this – they have been a delight to see! We have enjoyed playing outside in the sunshine while the weather has allowed us to with plenty of car driving and role play in the little house.

This week the Cygnets have been making some wonderful Father’s Day crafts for all the special daddies. The children really focussed and concentrated while making these and showed really careful and purposeful mark making. We hope they all have a lovely day on Sunday.

 

The Swans began the week with a walk to the post-box to send our birthday card to the King. Polly has kindly shared with us a special card she received from the King and Queen after their Coronation.

We have been listening to lots of stories about princesses and knights. The children have been very busy making cards and gifts for their Daddies or special people, we hope they like them, we had lots of fun making them! The Swans have made their own shields like knights. We have also made crowns fit for a prince or princess and sat on our throne.

 

In Pre-School this week the children have been learning about how we look after our teeth. We investigated which snacks would be healthier for our teeth. The children were super at sharing their ideas and listening respectfully to those of their friends – well done everyone! We looked closely at a huge model of teeth and shared some top tips for keeping teeth clean. The children watched a Cbeebies programme about a trip to the dentist and we now know that the children understand how important it is to keep their teeth healthy.

We have also been busy with our fine motor skills making some cards for someone special – we hope you like them. In phonics this week we have been exploring alliteration and using voice sounds. We have been so impressed with the children’s focus and attention in phonics – they will be experts ready for their next phase when they go to reception in September.

 

 

This week at Nursery

6th June 2025

What an awesome week at Buckingham Primary Nursery.The children returned from the half term break in very good spirits, ready to share news and listen to what their friends had been doing.  Our four rooms have been incredibly busy with a huge range of activities and events taking place ranging from Sports Day to visits from bee keepers to making birthday cards for the King! 

 

We have had a lovely week in the Chicks, welcoming all of our children back to Nursery after the half term. This half term we are going to be learning all about transport and holidays, starting off with a topic of cars. The children have found our car wash very exciting this week and have had great fun testing out their driving skills to move the car through the arch, seeing and feeling the different textured materials dangling down. The children have enjoyed exploring lots of different textures as we used different kinds of pasta, lentils and oats to make some roads in the tuff tray for the cars to drive along. We have also had a go at using some toy cars to make marks, by sticking some pens to the back of the cars before driving them around on the paper. This was a great activity to help develop the children's curiosity as everyone was fascinated with how their cars were able to leave trails behind. 

 Despite lots of rain, we have still had a wonderful time playing in the garden every day. This week we put a large tyre outside and provided the children with some chalk paints and brushes to make marks on the tyre. The children enjoyed having an unusual object to paint on and very helpfully, the rain washed our painting off ready to have another go! The rain has also provided some opportunities to experience different sounds and textures and it turns out that watching rain dripping from the roof can be just as exciting as playing with toys! 

 

This week in the Cygnets we have been looking at the beach. We had our tuff tray out this week with blue coloured rice and lots of different pictures of things at the beach. The children have enjoyed making different marks this week. Using paint brushes, the children decorated their own fish, some children used brush strokes and some dabbed the paint brush. The children wanted to make their own beach pictures so using glue, the children painted it all over their paper and sprinkled sand on top, we also added a sunshine using a crayon.

Inside and outside the children have enjoyed building with the bricks, the children would build their tower super high or see how long they can make their line.
Earlier on this week Pre-School had their sports day and we went to cheer them on, the children loved watching and clapping their hands.
As the weather has been quite wet the children got the opportunity to go in the hall to do soft play. We built bridges so we could go underneath and jump super high off the apparatus.

 

Welcome back to Nursery! The Swans children have chosen our topics for the next term, so we are starting with Princesses, Knights and Unicorns. We have helped to support our friends in Pre-School during their Sports Day. The Swans all sat beautifully and cheered very loudly for all of the races, we were very proud of all of them. We were very lucky to go to the school library to see a model of Buckingham in 1725 before The Great Fire. We even met some of the KS2 teachers who commented on how well behaved the children were. Thank you very much to Florence, Polly and Franklin who bought in some of their favourite things for our monthly Show and Tell, we love to hear about your special items. We have made princesses/princes using shapes, decorated numbered crowns with the corresponding jewels, made a birthday card for the king and even listened to some special stories brought in by Ada, thank you.

We have also been looking at how our Runner Beans have grown over the holiday, they are getting really tall. Thank you to everyone has sent us photos of their beans we have loved looking at them. Please keep sending them to us, we’d like to know if you grow some beans to eat.

 

In Pre-School this week we have been learning all about vegetables and finished the week by being able to explain why it is good to eat vegetables. Our focus text was Oliver’s Vegetables by Vivian French. It is a delightful tale about a little boy who will only eat chips but discovers a new liking for vegetables. Oliver plays a game with his grandpa…whatever vegetable Oliver finds in the garden, he must eat. On Monday, he pulls up carrots, on Tuesday, it is spinach . . .etc. The children have explored a huge range of vegetables and can describe what they look like, how they feel and smell and have tasted a range of them too.

 To continue our planting and growing learning we have sewn some cress seeds and have observed closely the way that our sunflowers have been growing. Today, the children have developed their observational drawing skills and had a go at sketching some of the vegetables choosing colours carefully and thinking hard about the marks they were making – well done everyone, some super drawings were produced. In phonics this week we explored aspect 5 in Phase 1 Phonics, alliteration, along with instrumental sounds and rhythm and rhyme. One of our highlights of the week was our sports day on Wednesday. Thank you all for coming along to support the children. We were blessed with perfect weather and the children made us all so proud with their enthusiasm, hard work and support of each other. Afterwards we shared some picnic bits with our families, we hope you enjoyed the day as much as we did.

 

This week at Nursery

23rd May 2025

What a busy and productive week at Buckingham Primary Nursery. The children have enjoyed a huge range of fun experiences and learning. Our learning about plants has continued with the Swans beans growing splendidly and they have now been transferred to our nursery garden. We are hoping they will flourish over the next few weeks and eventually cover the trellis. Visits to the library, the main school fields and our own woodland area have been popular. Special thanks to Mr Martin, who has constructed an amazing new slide for us. It has been well tested and the children report that it is brilliant!

 Thank you to all of the staff for making this half term so happy and successful and thanks to you all for supporting us here. I hope that your parents’ consultations were informative and gave you some quality time to talk about your child. Please remember that it is half term next week and we have an Inset Day on Monday 2^nd June so we look forward to seeing all our term time only children again on Tuesday 3^rd June. We wish you all a happy and peaceful week.

We’ve had another wonderful week to end the half term in the Chicks. This week we have been focusing on farm animals, which the children have thoroughly enjoyed. The children have been working on developing their palmar grasp by using a variety of pink pencils and crayons to make marks on their own pig pictures. We have also been busy with the paints too, using some farm animal shape cutters dipped in paint and stamped on the paper. It was a little tricky to hold the shapes as they became slippery with paint but the children showed great perseverance to work out different ways to move them.

 The children have also enjoyed making some fluffy paper plate sheep by sticking with cotton wool balls. This was a fantastic activity for working on the children’s fine motor skills as they practised using their forefinger and thumb to pick up individual balls of cotton wool. We also created a farmyard sensory tray with hay and small world animals for the children to explore, the hay caused lots of giggles as a result of some ticklish feet! 

The last week in Cygnets we have been looking at lots of different nursery rhymes. At the start of the week the children enjoyed sticking to make a doctor’s bag for Miss Polly. We also looked at Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and the children enjoyed a craft where they used a star play dough cutter and stamped it in some paint then onto the paper to make a star print. Finally, we focused on Wind the Bobbin Up, where the children used the bobbins to make different patterns.
As it was National Bee Day this week the children enjoyed creating their own bee by using a glue stick and sticking black strips and eyes on, they look amazing!
The children have also enjoyed using our workshop outside and have loved fixing things as well as using the wooden bricks to build super, tall towers!

 The children in Swans have been really "buzzing" this week. We began by planting our own runner beans, which the children have now taken home. We'd love to see how your beans have grown, share photos and talk about them in Nursery. For World Bee Day we were lucky enough to be given some fantastic photos, honeycomb, part of a hive and lots of interesting information. The children were really excited when they were allowed to wear a real Bee Keeper’s suit and gloves. We were also given some local honey for the children to taste. Thank you very much to Jane Rixon for making our day so much fun.

 The children have also made paper plate bees using a striped pattern. They used different sized rectangles to make hives for our bees. Finally, we have been looking at and talking about our runner bean experiment which we began last week. The beans have lots of roots on them so we have planted them in our planters at the top of our outdoor area. Hopefully we will be able to watch them grow and maybe a few beers may visit the flowers they should produce.

Another wonderful week in Pre-School has flown by. Our focus book has been The Bad-Tempered Ladybird by Eric Carle. It gave us lots of opportunities for some personal, social and emotional teaching by sharing with the children what bad-tempered means, what we could do if we are feeling grumpy or down. Importantly, we covered who we could talk to about it and where we could go for some peaceful down time. We have areas within nursery that facilitate this, particularly our Cosy Nook which the children use to have some quiet time with an adult or their friends.

 Our maths focus this week was to deepen our understanding of 5. We looked at arrangements of 5 spots on ladybirds and had practical experience of number bonds to 5; our children really impressed us with this. Lots of fun was had when printing some symmetrical butterflies while developing an understanding of symmetry alongside having fun with choosing and using paint colours. Rhythm and Rhyme, Body Percussion and Instrumental Sounds have all been covered during our Phase 1 phonics teaching, and Sports Day practice was enjoyed in the sunshine. As always, the children have been showing us their focus and attention and their capacity to support each other and work together; all super skills for being school ready – well done Pre-School, you are fabulous!

This week at Nursery

16th May 2025

This week we have had an outdoors, fun time here at Buckingham Primary Nursery; making good use of the fabulous weather. The children have thoroughly enjoyed exploring the wider environment and much time has been spent in our woodland area which now offers us shade and peace on a hot and sunny day. The children have all enjoyed caring for our nursery gardens and have been doing lots of planting. Unfortunately, the squirrels decided to take advantage of this and ate a lot of the sunflower seeds that the children had sewn in Pre-School; thankfully, Jane came to the recue and resolved the problem and we hope we now have a squirrel proof growing area! As always, the children have enjoyed a huge range of  wonderful activities planned by our amazing team ranging from finding spaghetti worms in chocolate soil to throwing flies to a hungry spider in its web!

 This week in the Chicks room we have been learning all about Minibeasts. Throughout the week the children have enjoyed exploring the small world insects and experimenting with how to use magnifying glasses - they are great fun for pulling silly faces through! We have created some very colourful and sparkly snails which look wonderful on our display board as well as doing some painting with corks to create some lovely butterflies. We have spent time rescuing bugs trapped inside jelly too, it got a little messy but was good fun making the jelly wobble and squishing it in our hands. On Friday we created a taste-safe tuff tray with spaghetti worms and cocoa powder soil for the children to explore. This activity was great for developing the children's fine motor skills as they tried to pick up the spaghetti as well as a wonderful sensory experience in the 'dirt'. 

 With another sunny week has also come lots of time outside again. Splashing around in the water tray has been a favourite activity as always and the children have all spent a lot of time making lots of noise at the music wall this week too. The children have also taken a keen interest in the balls this week, we have spent lots of time using all different sizes of balls to practice rolling, kicking and throwing - the children have great aim!

 

This week in the Cygnets we have been learning about 'Miss Polly Had A Dolly'. We have really enjoyed singing the song and joining in with the actions. The children have had lots of fun in the sunshine and have been busy bathing the babies in the water, making them really clean. This has been a wonderful activity for the sunny days that we have had.

 They have also been deciding what they think would be good to put in the doctor’s bag to make Miss Polly better and produced some wonderful doctor’s bags using their fine motor skills to stick a range of items into a bag. 
The children have also been looking after their flowers and herbs by giving them lots of water to help them grow. They are growing so well – we are really pleased with the way that the children are caring for them and we can’t wait to see them bloom!

 

The Swans this week we have been learning about our 8-legged friends, spiders. We were lucky enough to find a real spider and used a magnifying pot to look at it as closely as some of us dared! The children loved singing Incy Wincy Spider and are now experts at doing the actions. We have had some very messy hands as we painted them to make handprint spiders, it took a lot of washing to get all of the black paint off of our hands.

 The children have been playing a game of throwing balls at a web made of tape to feed Mrs Aris the spider. We have been practicing our fine motor skills by using tweezers to get our spiders out from underneath their web. We have been doing an experiment with runner beans. We planted them in a clear bottle and cotton wool so we can watch the bean roots grow. Next week we are going to be growing our own to look after at home.

 

In Pre-School this week the children have really impressed us with the way that they have listened to, remembered and recalled new knowledge. Our focus text for the week was Busy Buzzy Bee by Stacy Bax. It is a beautifully illustrated book that teaches children all about bees and their vital contribution to our planet. We learnt lots of bee facts that we didn’t know before like bees have five eyes and four wings and they talk to each other by performing a wiggle waggle dance – wow! We were delighted that our bee experts transferred their learning into fantastic bee plates where they chose and attached their own resources to show all of the details and also in free painting sessions – amazing work everyone this week.

 The children enjoyed tasting honey that we now know the bees work so hard to produce and we also spent time caring for our plants, some of which are sunflowers which we know the bees will love. In phonics this week we have been focussing on body percussion, rhythm and rhyme and instrumental sounds. Everyone is showing that they are getting school ready with their focus and attention in these sessions, Pre-School are definitely tuning in to sounds – well done everyone for another wonderful week from you all.

 

This week at Nursery

9th May 2025

Another brilliant week at Buckingham Primary Nursery. We are ending the week with a gloriously sunny day which we hope continues into the weekend for you all. The children are all playing and learning beautifully and are developing a wonderful sense of care and responsibility for our nursery environment – this is a joy to see – well done everyone.
There has been quite a gardening theme across nursery this week. Many of our children are growing seeds and we are very much hoping that we will have a wonderful variety of plants sprouting soon. Our Nursery garden is also growing; Luella very kindly donated some sleepers and compost to us and Mr Martin used his woodwork magic to create two wonderful planters with a trellis arch. We are hoping to grow some beans across the arch and also something that will be of interest all year round. If you are growing plants at home and have spare we would very much appreciate donations. On Thursday we joined the school in commemorating the 80^th anniversary of VE day. The children wore red, white and blue and listened to some of the songs from the time with some of the children joining together for a celebratory picnic.

This week in the Chicks room we have been learning all about pet animals. We set up a dog grooming station with lots of soft toy dogs and brushes, everyone has shown great care for the dogs and some children have even practiced brushing their own hair too! We have been busy making some lovely crafts too. The children have enjoyed doing some sponge painting and sticking to create a paper plate cat and we were even able to link our pets theme to VE Day by using small world dogs dipped in red, white and blue paint to make flags. To finish off the week we created a sensory tray with lots of different textures and hidden pictures of our own pets to discover underneath!

 The children have continued to enjoy spending time in the garden, looking at books in the sunshine and doing lots of digging in the sandpit. We have also been for a walk around the school this week, the children liked seeing all the different sights and we all had great fun exploring some of the big children's play equipment.

 

In the Cygnets room this week we have been continuing with our nursery rhymes. This week’s rhymes, chosen by the children, were Incy, Wincy Spider and Hop Little Bunnies; the children have absoulutely loved singing them and we hope they have been singing them to you at home as well.

 We celebrated VE day by making crowns, decorating bunting and flags and a, a favourite activity was decorating biscuits in red, white and blue icing which really developed their fine motor skills, we are well informed that they tasted delicious and that not much sharing of them was done at home! Our seeds that we planted last week are doing very well. Our wild flowers are now poking through the soil and our herbs are really growing well. The children are showing lots of care by making sure the new plants are looked after and watered.

 

In Swans we began this week with the story of the Snail and the Whale, talking about being kind to others. We also had our first Show and Tell, Florence and her bubble blower. The children have enjoyed getting a little messy doing finger painting on our snails’ shells. We have also been using coloured pebbles to make beautiful patterns on a large snail. As well as singing songs about lots of different mini beasts we have also been listening to songs from the wartime during our VE Day celebration. We all loved watching a short clip of the planes flying over Buckingham Palace, especially the Red Arrows with their red, white and blue smoke. The children have been sponge painting bunting and the Union flag to decorate our room before joining Pre-School to have a picnic in our outdoor area. We have also been making some very glittery snail trails.

 On Friday we had a Mystery Reader, Polly's Mummy who came to read us The Tiger who came to Tea. Thank you very much Polly's Mummy it was such a fantastic story and I think we had one very surprised little girl when you came. We love to have special visitors come to see us and read stories, if you would like to be one of them please do let us know.

 

In Pre-School this week the children have been counting and recognising the numerals 1 to 5. They have practised this through lots of counting games and songs and by counting a set of objects and placing them next to the numeral including some of the foods from our Very Hungry Caterpillar story. As part of the children’s transition journey we spent some time this week talking about how they are becoming more independent as they are getting ready for school. We are seeing lots of positive developments in Pre-School; the children are very settled in their key person groups the Butterflies, Bees and Ladybirds and are showing great focus and attention in their adult led time and phonics lessons. This week in phonics we have explored instrumental sounds, body percussion and environmental sounds; a super effort everyone! All children have planted sunflower seeds which we are hoping will ‘germinate’, ‘sprout’ and become a ‘seedling’ these words being part of our vocabulary focus this week.

 

This week at Nursery

2nd May 2025

Another super week in Buckingham Primary Nursery; the sun has been shining and so have the pupils and staff. There have been many instances this week where I have seen the most amazing kind and caring behaviours from your children towards their peers. This demonstrates the inclusive ethos that we have at here, the children are kind and welcoming and help each other which is wonderful to see. We had several tours this week from prospective parents and many commented on how friendly and polite the children are – thank you and well done everyone!
With the abundance of sunshine this week I am reminding you again that all children need a hat, sun cream and water to drink when at Nursery. Please ensure that sun cream is applied at home before arrival at Nursery and if it needs reapplying please provide it in a named bottle and we will happliy help when it is needed.

 It has been another wonderful week in the Chicks room, full of sunshine and laughter. This week we decided to make the best of the sunshine and all the opportunities for water play, choosing sea creatures for our topic. We created an underwater den for the children to explore, with lots of different sea creatures to see and play with. The children have been demonstrating their brilliant mark-making skills by spending time using the paint sticks to decorate some colourful fish. We have also had lots of fun using Duplo blocks and paint to create some starfish, they looked very effective. On Friday we decided to create a big easel for all the children to share by wrapping clingfilm around the table legs to paint on! The children made sure to experiment with lots of different brushes and colours. 

 Of course, with lots of wonderful sunny weather we have spent lots of time outside. Water play with lots of different sea creatures has definitely been the children’s favourite activity this week. We have all had a go at making some huge splashes and lots of children have discovered the fun of squeezing the fish toys to make them squirt the water! The children have also been very interested in the sea creatures we trapped in ice, it was very cold and slippery but great to help keep everyone cool. 

 This week in the Cygnets we have been focusing on the rhyme Row, Row Your Boat. The children have enjoyed a lot of activities this week outside as the weather has been so lovely and warm!
For our craft activity this week the children explored decorating their own boats using corks for stamping. The children also got the opportunity plant their own herbs, using their fine motor skills they scooped the soil, sprinkled the seeds into the milk bottle pot and used the watering can to water their herbs. We can't wait to watch them grow!
During the week the children loved our paint messy tray. They enjoyed painting their hands, themselves and the tray, they also were going between the paint tray and a water tray to wash the paint off. They especially enjoyed getting the staff messy!

 Getting wet was the children's favourite thing again this week; they thoroughly enjoyed getting sprayed with the hose and Mr Martin found us a sprinkler which they loved too! We also had lots of fun with bubbles and boats while singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat!

 

In the Swans room this week we have been having lots of fun in the sunshine. At the beginning of the week we went for a minibeast hunt in the Natural Area and around the school grounds. The children enjoyed using magnifying glasses to look at ants, worms and spiders. We have made lots of ladybirds, apple printing, paper plates and handprints which can be seen around the Swans room. We have even made ladybird biscuits using lots of fine motor skills to carefully put the icing on and add the ladybird’s spots.

 The children have been doing lots of running, climbing and balancing on the KS1 climbing equipment and field area. We had a visitor on Friday, Bella’s Daddy, who came to read “What the Ladybird Heard”. Thank you very much, the children and adults loved it!

In Pre-School this week the children have been focussing on the lifecycle of a caterpillar and can now talk confidently about it using new language. They demonstrated their knowledge by ordering pictures correctly alongside practising their cutting and sticking skills.

 During their free painting sessions, the expressive use of colour has been a joy to see and these now form some caterpillars on our learning wall. The children also enjoyed developing their skills to combine a range of materials in different ways making a wide variety of objects during junk modelling.
We spent several sessions in our forest area this week. The children have observed the seasonal changes that have taken place over the last few weeks and enjoyed the peace that the outdoors offers under the canopy of oak leaves. In phonics we have continued with our Phase 1 learning; this week focussing on rhythm and rhyme, instrumental sounds, body percussion and environmental sounds. The children are showing that they are developing super skills listening for, tuning in to and repeating different sounds all which will benefit them hugely when they start in Reception.

This week at Nursery

25th April 2025

What an awesome first week back at Buckingham Primary Nursery following our Easter break. The children have returned settled and happy and there has been a busy, productive buzz around which is a joy. We have experienced all sorts of weather this week but we are ending in the sunshine which we expect to continue into next week. On that note, please ensure that your children have named sun-cream to hand in to their Key Person if they do not have an all day one applied and sunhats to wear outdoors. Please also remember that we are a healthy eating school and we request that the children only have water to drink in their bottles.

In Chicks we have had a fantastic first week back after the Easter holidays. This half term we are going to be learning all about animals, and we have started off with looking at jungle animals. The children have all shown great knowledge, being able to make lots of different animal sounds. We have done some painting and sticking to make some scary lion faces as well as practicing our fine motor skills to stick feathers to create some very colourful parrots. On Friday, the children all had a wonderful time exploring our leafy jungle tuff tray with spinach leaves, mushroom rocks and broccoli trees! 

 Over the Easter weekend, Kirsty and her family have been giving the Chicks garden a well-deserved makeover. Throughout the week the children have enjoyed exploring all the new things. The musical wall has been a big hit with the saucepans and colourful chimes! We have a new guttering wall which has been great fun to watch the balls roll down, along with lots of mirrors which the children have loved pulling faces at. 
Please remember to provide your child with appropriate clothing for the ever-changing weather along with suitable footwear to allow the children to continue to comfortably explore their outdoor spaces in all weathers. 

 

In Cygnets the children have had a great first week back. This term we have a focus on nursery rhymes which we are planning around the children's interests. To start off the term we chose The Wheels on the Bus, which is one of the children's firm favourites!
At the start of the week we had the bus tent out which the children loved as they could pop their heads out of the top and wave to everyone as well as singing the Wheels on the Bus while inside. We have also been busy with our craft activities; the children made their own marks using the bus and rolling it on the paper as well as sticking different red materials onto the bus.
Since the children came back from Easter they have enjoyed playing in our new sandpit building lots and lots of sandcastles. As summer is around the corner, the children enjoyed clearing out our planter and sowing some seeds to watch the flowers grow in our garden, we can't wait to see what they look like!

 We are also focusing on the children's favourite books so please could we have a picture of your child with their favourite book, Thank you!

 

We’ve had a bit of a “wiggly” start to the term in the Swans room.  Our main topic is Minibeasts and this week we have talking about, moving like and even building homes for worms. Some of us were even brave enough to touch the worms! We began the week by building our own Wormery and have been watching what happens to the soil, sand and worms all week. On Friday the children chose where we should release our worms back into their natural environment and watched what happened.

 We have been singing about the worm at the bottom of the garden and had a visitor called Theo from Year 5 come to read “Superworm” to us. Thanks Theo! We have welcomed 2 new children to the Swans room, Ella and Zion also Olha has moved into our room. We also made flags to celebrate St. George's Day and hung them around our room.

In Pre-School the children have settled well into their new room, which had a makeover over the Easter break, and new routines. The children are getting school ready and now have a more structured day and learning times in their groups. They are taking part in Phase 1 Phonics sessions twice a day and this week have been learning to tune into environmental sounds; they had to listen really carefully and identify an animal or object from the sound that hey heard. Phase 1 Phonics is crucial to get right before the children learn their letter sounds when they are in Reception class. We know that our children will be experts and ready for Phase 2 Phonics by then!

 Our focus book this week has been The Hungry Caterpillar by the wonderful Eric Carle. The children are now able to talk about the life cycle of a caterpillar and produced some amazing craft and repeating patterns to complement the story – a brilliant first week back Pre-School!

This week at Nursery

4th April 2025

What a fabulous last week of the term at Buckingham Primary Nursery. We have loved the warm sunshine and lots of outdoors exploring and play leading up to the Easter break.

 

 Today we said goodbye to Kerry, the children made her some beautiful cards to go with her gifts and sang some of her favourite nursery songs. We have loved having Kerry as a part of the nursery team and wish her every success with her future plans.
We wish you all a happy and peaceful Easter break. Our term time children and staff are off for two weeks and return to Nursery on Tuesday 22^nd April. For our all year round children there is lots of fun to be had over the next couple of weeks and we will see you again on Monday.

 We have had a wonderful week to round off another term in the Chicks room. This week, our nursery rhyme has been 'Row, Row, Row your Boat' and I definitely think it's the children's favourite! During the week the children have done some lovely mark making with the paint sticks to decorate their own boats, our fine motor skills are developing so well and everyone is very creative. The children also enjoyed using some Duplo blocks dipped in paint to stamp with and make scales on some crocodiles, they looked very effective. On Friday we created a blue shaving foam tuff tray with lots of boats for the children to explore. It was great fun to scoop the foam with the boats and our hands, clapping and making the foam fly around too. 

  With lots of glorious sunshine this week has come lots of water play too. The children have had the best time doing lots of splashing, pushing the boats around in the water and down the guttering slides. We added some ice to the water tray which the children discovered was very cold and slippery, but made great splashes when thrown into the water. Everyone has loved spending lots of time in the house outside, it's such a great place to practice saying hi, bye and playing peekaboo!

This week in the Cygnets room has been super busy! We have been looking at spring animals. On a Monday the children love to know what is new in the tuff tray and this week we have dyed rice with flowers and our spring animals, chicks, sheep and bunnies. The children used their fine motor skills to scoop up the rice with their eggs and either pour it back into the tuff tray or into the other side of the egg, they also enjoyed playing with the animals and making their noises.
Making a big splash this week has been the children's favourite thing to do! Using their fine motor skills again they were scooping and pouring with the buckets and watering cans, they also enjoyed scooping the flowers and hiding them in their buckets. In the afternoons the children have popped lots and lots of bubbles, and are doing an amazing job at blowing them with the wand too.
As we are going into the Easter holidays the children designed their own Easter eggs by dipping corks into paint and stamping them onto an egg shape. They have also decorated bunnies either with paint, glitter or colouring pencils to hang up in the room.

 We also had such a treat this week and Nicki kindly brought in her dog Bonnie. The children LOVED her. They watched her have treats and enjoyed giving Bonnie a stroke.
Lastly, all the Easter bonnets looked amazing, have a lovely Easter we look forward to seeing you all after the holidays.

This week the Swans have been talking about their favourite foods, which ones are healthy and some which we need to have as treats.

 We have been helping the children to understand the importance of having a balanced diet. The children have been singing lots of songs about food. We have also been practicing how to brush our teeth using a very large model of teeth and gums. We have been lucky enough to visit Tina, our chef in the school kitchen. The children asked her lots of questions about her job, how she prepares our lunches and what her favourite food that she makes for us is.

A busy and productive week in Pre-School. The children have thoroughly enjoyed the sunny weather to go with their Easter and egg themed learning. We hunted for eggs, decorated eggs and balanced eggs on spoons and tried walking with them. Our fine motor skills have been developed with sorting eggs into egg boxes and when putting icing and sprinkles onto biscuits – they were delicious! The children looked closely at cress seeds and each sewed some – we look forward to hearing whether they grew successfully.

 The children in Pre-School have told us about their favourite moments this week. Alfie enjoyed playing in the sand – he made ice creams, Ronnie liked playing on the slide because it is warmer, Henry’s best bit was going faster on the bikes and making a car wash to clean the bikes and Owen has been doing some digging for dinosaur eggs in the Digger Pit, he found them all, it was little but will get bigger. Thank -you, children, for sharing these with me today!
We have been very proud of the children’s achievements this term and look forward to the Summer term which will be lots of fun!

 

This week at Nursery
28th March 2025

A super happy, outdoors week for us at Buckingham Primary Nursery. We have had a lot of fun, often in the sunshine, which has been delightful!
On Sunday, we had a team of volunteers come in to nursery to give the Swans and Pre-School garden a makeover. We had a very long and busy day but with plenty of cake we managed to transform it into what you now see.  A huge thank you to Emma and her family, Kirsty, Jane and my two sons for their hard work on their day off, what a team! The nursery children were delighted with their new garden. They have played beautifully in the different zones and have thoroughly enjoyed the new experiences it offers. They have also worked so well together and used their ‘Choose it, Use it, Put it away’ rule to make sure it stays looking fabulous. Well done everyone.

 We would like to wish all of our mothers a very happy Mothering Sunday – we hope you enjoy your cards and treats and have a wonderful day.

 

We have had another fantastic week in the Chicks room. This week our nursery rhyme of choice has been 'Miss Polly had a Dolly'. To link in with this, the children have loved looking after all of the toy babies in the home corner, cuddling them, pushing them in the pushchair and feeding them bottles too, we certainly have some very caring children! We have been very busy throughout the week creating some very special cards and gifts for our special people on Mother's Day, we hope you all love them. The children loved getting VERY messy this week as we did some full body painting, having a splash around in the bath after was great fun too. On Friday we created a sensory tray with cereals of all different sizes, shapes and textures for the children to explore. The children have used spoons and bowls to practice their scooping and working on their hand-eye coordination as well as carrying out lots of taste testing too!

Another dry week has meant lots of time outside again too. The large foam blocks continue to be a very popular resource in the garden, they're great for building towers to knock down as well as making good seats! The children have enjoyed doing lots of scooping in the sandpit and have spent lots of time playing peekaboo in the house. We have been to do some soft play this week too which was lots of fun. The children had a wonderful time crawling through tunnels, building towers and moving all the different pieces around the hall. On Friday we went for a nice walk around the school grounds, exploring all the different equipment on the playground, doing lots of running in the big spaces and collecting lots of sticks on the way. 

 

This week in the Cygnets we have been looking at all and talking about of our pets, thank you for sending in the photos for us to see. The children loved our tuff tray this week as they got to see their pets hidden in rice krispies!
At the start of the week the children got to make biscuits for Mother's Day, we measured our ingredients, gave them a good mix and then with some super strong muscles we rolled out our dough and cut our heart shapes. Once the children had finished making their biscuits we went for a walk over to the kitchen so the kitchen team could cook them for us.

 Later in the week the children developed their fine motor skills when painting their own dogs they enjoyed pointing out its ears, feet and tail. This week outside the children have enjoyed making loud noises with the saucepans and rolling balls down the guttering.

 

We have had a great week in the Swans room. We have been so excited to explore our new outdoors area. There has been lots of bike races, water play, dressing up, stories in the Cosy Nook, sandcastles and digging with the dinosaurs. Also, some of the children have made perfume for their Mummies in our Potions and Lotions station. The Swans room has been filled with lots of singing, familiar songs and also some new or traditional ones. The children love our new singing game “what’s in the bag?”, they sing the question then take it in turns to choose a song from the bag. We were lucky enough to visit the Performing Arts room in the KS2 building. The children played some of the instruments and were able to watch themselves dancing or moving in front of the wall of mirrors. The children loved the experience.

 We have also been very busy making cards and a small gift for our Mummies, we hope you like them and have a relaxing Mother’s Day on Sunday

 

This week in Pre-School has been lots of fun. We have loved the new garden area. The children have especially loved making lots of Lotions and Potions in our new area using fresh flowers, water and some leaves, it has developed the children’s fine motor skills with lots of precise cutting.

 In the Construction Area there has been a lot of imaginative role play where the children have created little scenarios and worked together to fix a car or build a house. A car wash was set up by the children using the Splash Zone it was very busy there and now we have lots of very clean bikes, trikes and scooters, well done children for caring for our vehicles.
Food and healthy eating have been a focus for the week. We have had a lot of great chats about our favourite foods, we also talked about which foods are healthier and which food are more treat foods. The children really impressed us with their knowledge of this.

 

This week at Nursery     
21st March 2025

Another happy and sunny week at Buckingham Primary Nursery. We have been blessed with plenty of sunshine this week and this has allowed us to spend even more time outside exploring our nursery outdoors areas and the wider school grounds. During our outdoors time we are spotting lots of signs of Spring and watching new plants grow; including the bulbs we planted in Pre-School. It has been wonderful to see the children dressed in red today to support Comic Relief. Many thanks for your kind donations all money given will help to support people who are facing the toughest times of their lives, here in the UK and around the world. Every donation makes a difference.

 

 

 

 

What a lovely week we've had in the Chicks room. This week we have been focusing on the nursery rhyme Incy Wincy Spider, with lots of spider themed activities. The children have all been really interested in the giant cobweb tuff tray, rescuing the spiders through gaps in the stringy web. We have also had lots of fun using some cardboard tubes dipped in paint to create our own spiders as well as doing some sticking with string to create some spider webs. 

 We were lucky to have some lovely weather this week so the children have enjoyed their time outside, especially doing some water play! We have also been for a nice walk to the tyres on the school's playground to explore the different play equipment there.

 

This week’s focus in the Cygnets has been zoo animals. The children have enjoyed making lions by using forks to print the lion’s face and then stick eyes on which was great for the development of their fine motor skills. We have also made tigers by sponge painting and sticking on black stripes and eyes. In our sensory tuff tray, we had lots of zoo animals with rice and pasta, the children enjoyed making all the different noises of the animals.

As it was St Patrick's Day, the children made their own shamrocks (a type of clover used as a symbol of Ireland) with green paint and sprinkling lots of glitter on top. With the weather being warmer again the children have loved playing outside especially getting super wet in the water! In the garden, we have been watching our flowers grow, the children have enjoyed looking after them and watering them.

 

This week in the Swans room we began celebrating St Patrick’s day by cork printing some shamrocks and decorating a rainbow sun catcher. The whole display looks beautiful!

The children have been talking about their favourite toys and we have even been playing some older games including throwing coloured objects into a matching circle, 10 pin bowling and elastics (which the adults really enjoyed teaching to the children!). The children have also had fun playing a memory game with some of their favourite toys from around the Swans room. The adults bought in some of their old toys from when they were little, the children enjoyed looking at them. On Friday, to celebrate Red Nose Day, we made faces and talked about what features we have on our own faces.

 

Another busy week in Pre-School. This week we have been exploring our favourite sounds, songs and music. We have been listening to different types of music from classical and pop to jazz. We made drawings listening to ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ and enjoyed listening and moving to ‘Popcorn’.

Pre-School have enjoyed the beautiful weather this week, getting out and exploring nature, we found snails and earthworms in the garden and learnt how to hold and be gentle with them because they are living creatures.
We have been working together to play games, build obstacle courses and make dens in the tunnel.

 

This week at Nursery
14th March 2025

What a fantastic, colourful time at nursery, full of chatter and laughter. The children have had the opportunity to explore so many wonderful things this week. We were delighted to welcome Isla's daddy and three very special guests to the nursery, they were yellow and fluffy and very cute. Thank you so very much, Isla and her daddy for making that possible. There has been a lot of exploration of our fabulous school grounds throughout the week with a special visit to see something amazing in the pond - read on to find out more!

 We have had another wonderful week in the Chicks room. This week we have had a space themed room to link in with our nursery rhyme '5 Little Men in a Flying Saucer'. Throughout the week the children have all enjoyed exploring in the space tent and have been fascinated by the twinkling fairy light stars as well as pointing out all the alien and rocket pictures. We have created some wonderful alien faces and practiced our fine motor skills to pick up small pieces of tissue paper to stick onto a paper plate whilst doing so. The children have also had lots of fun using sponges and brushes to have a go at painting, designing their own flying saucer for the aliens. On Friday we also created some green gloop with cornflour for the children to experiment with, everyone enjoyed dipping their hands into the gloop and watching as it poured from their hands. This week the children also had a great time exploring our fruit and veg sensory basket, feeling all the different textures and of course finding out the different tastes! 

 We have continued to spend lots of time in our outdoor spaces where the children enjoy using the house to play peekaboo and doing lots of scooping and pouring in the sandpit too. Could we please ask that once your child is beginning to show signs of walking that you provide them with a suitable pair of shoes to help keep them comfortably warm and dry whilst outside. 

This week in the Cygnets room we have had lots of fun learning about farm animals. We have focussed on the song ‘OId Macdonald had a Farm’ and have enjoyed lots and lots of animal books. On Monday, we had a visit from Isla’s daddy and he brought in three real chicks for us to see and touch. It was a wonderful visit and the children were very gentle when stroking and even holding some of the chicks. Isla was a superb helper and was able to pass the chicks from child to child and she encouraged nervous children to stroke the chicks. Thank you so much Isla and her daddy – it was the highlight of our week!
The children have thoroughly enjoyed lots of animal related craft including cotton wool sheep and feathery chicks.

 Our tuff spot has been a farmyard with Weetabix for the hay bales and coco pops, shreddies and cheerios were the soil. The animals really loved exploring it and the children took part in lots of farmyard chatter. We have been on lots of outdoors walks and have loved playing with the farm tractors and animals.

 

The Swans have had a very colourful week. The children and adults began the week by sharing their favourite colours with each other. We have been for a walk around the school grounds, talking about all of the different colours we could see. We have even been doing our own experiments with colours too. The children were amazed when they saw what we could do with a bag of Skittles and a jug of warm water, it made a beautiful rainbow pattern.

 They also loved to watch what happened when we added some food colouring to milk then dipped cotton buds in to washing up liquid and the food colouring moved around like exploding fireworks. There was lots of laughter when the children tried this themselves. To follow on from last terms topic of growth we have visited the pond area to look at the frog spawn, also we were also very lucky to be invited to go and see some baby chicks in the Cygnets room. There were also some lovely smiles for our Swans room photo. Finally, to celebrate Holi the children have been blow painting a big banner, it was very messy but lots of fun.

 

This week in Pre-School we have been exploring colour and looking at our favourite colours. We have been reading books which look at how different colours are made and mixing coloured cornflour to make new colours which was messy and fun! The children have also been experimenting with watercolours making new colours to create pictures, and mixing directly onto the paper.
We have also been inspired by the book colour dance which is about children dancing with scarves to make different colours, the Pre-School children danced with coloured scarves to music to see if they could make different colours.
We have been finding out what our favourite colours are and seeing which colour is the most popular. It was fun with each child putting up their favourite colours on our chart, pink was the most popular with yellow, red and blue also being favourites.

We had some wonderful surprises this week when one of the parents brought in some 2 week old chicks. The children were very keen to stroke the chicks fluffy feathers and some children were brave enough to pick them up and hold them. Then Mr Martin, the caretaker, told us a secret that there was frogspawn in the school pond, so together we went to the pond and found lots of frogspawn, we also looked around looking for signs of spring.
We have been going on walks around the school and playing on the 'big children's' play equipment,
Thank you to our mystery readers this week. Alea was fantastic reading Don't Bring a Dragon to Dinner, she really got the children involved in the story, asking them lots of questions, and counting how many dragons were in the book. Trikshan who came in and read The Monkey with the Bright Blue Bottom, which made the children laugh!

 

 

This week at Nursery 7th March 2025

What a wonderful week at nursery. Communication Week, with its’ theme of ‘Engage with chat, Explore with play, Read together’ has been evident everywhere. We celebrated World Book Day on Thursday which transformed the nursery with the most amazing dressing up by the children and staff and a huge range of books thoroughly enjoyed by all. The sun has been shining for us too – what a joy!

 We’ve had a brilliant Communication Week in the Chicks’ room. This week’s nursery rhyme of choice was Old MacDonald had a Farm, and what fun we’ve had learning about so many animals! We started off the week by creating some very cute chick pictures, the children used a loofah to paint on the paper before sticking on some yellow feathers, eyes and a beak. The children discovered some very muddy pigs outside too, that had been rolling around in the cocoa powder mud so, we used some water and brushes to help clean the mud from the pigs. After the pigs had so much fun in the mud some of the other farm animals joined in too, this time they got messy in some chocolate custard mud. The children had a fantastic time exploring the texture of the ‘mud’, splashing and squelching with their hands whilst we talked about the animals we could see and the sounds they make.

The children have also been investigating all the different marks that can be made with the farm animals and vehicles when we dip them in paint, we all worked together and made a very colourful piece of artwork. This week we created a farmyard sensory tray too which the children have had lots of fun exploring, feeling the different textures and listening to the different sounds made when moving the animals across them. 

On World Book Day we had great fun dressing up as our favourite book characters and reading lots of stories, there were some wonderful costumes! Throughout the week, we have also been inviting staff from across the different rooms within the nursery to come and read a story to the children, helping to familiarise the children with all the adults at nursery. On Thursday we even had Kerry the ‘Evil Pea’ come to read us a story! The children have all responded so well to this activity and we have been so impressed by how beautifully they have all sat and listened to the stories. We’re looking forward to more of our wonderful nursery staff coming to visit the Chicks for story time over the coming weeks! 

The sun even came out to play this week, which was very exciting. We swapped out the dry leaves for sand in our digging pit this week, which has been an absolute hit with the children. They have been able to practice their hand-eye coordination whilst using spades to scoop sand into the buckets, and there has been lots of laughter from our cheeky sandcastle destroyers! The children have also continued to access the musical instruments outside as well as the ride on toys and building blocks. 

 

This week in the Cygnets we have been looking at Dinosaurs and it has been super busy! The children loved playing in the dinosaur sensory tray which contained cocoa powder, sand and leaves. They enjoyed scooping it up and sprinkling it on the dinosaurs as well as making the dinosaurs stomp. The children loved this tuff tray as it was so messy but when it came to tidy up time they did such a good job at helping clean it up, well done guys!

The children enjoyed making their dinosaurs colourful by using a glue stick and their sticking skills. They also enjoyed stomping the dinosaur on the paper and watching what marks it makes.

As the weather has been so lovely this week the children have loved going outside. In one of our tuff trays the children enjoyed finding the hidden words in the sand and making dinosaur footprints. In our other tuff tray the children enjoyed using their fine motor skills to pour water from the watering cans and making BIG splashes! We have also been making lots of different marks and pictures outside with the chalks which has left the garden looking very colourful.

As it was World Book Day this week the children enjoyed making their own Gruffalo crumble, scooping into their bowl and telling us what flavour they made. To go in with this week subject of Dinosaurs the children enjoyed decorating their own Dinosaur biscuits for Harry's Dinosaurs.

 Next week in the Cygnets we are focusing on Farm Animals. On Monday we have some Chicks coming in for the children to see, if you wish for your child not to participate in this activity please do let us know.

 

There has been lots of chatting, singing & stories in Swans this week for Communication Week. The Tiger Who Came to Tea came to tea in our home corner, we made lots of play dough Stickmen, Stickladies & Stick children. The children have been playing a game to match pairs of characters from some of their favourite stories. On Pancake Day we role played making pancakes & even got to try some real ones for snack. Our room was filled with some amazing costumes on World Book Day, the children talked about who they were dressed as. We went on a bear hunt around the school grounds, found the bear & he chased us back to Nursery but couldn’t catch us. Paddington Bear came to visit us so we made him some marmalade sandwiches & made some for ourselves too.

We have been so delighted with the children’s efforts with our Show and Tell sessions this week. The children were absolutely wonderful not only with being confident to talk to a group but also by sitting politely listening to their friends – well done everyone, we are so proud of you all.

 

Wow what a fantastic week we have had in Pre-School. This week we have been celebrating Bucks Communication Week. Each day we have been exploring a different book, talking about characters, exploring activities based on the theme of the books and looking at different ways we communicate with each other and not just talking.

We also had a special Mystery Reader via Zoom as David Litchfield, the author of the bear and the piano, read the story, while a bear joined him on the piano. The children were also taught how to draw the bear.

We have been learning the days of the week in Makaton which was lots of fun, and adding to the many signs we have been learning over the last couple of weeks.

To celebrate World Book Day, we all dressed up as some favourite characters from books and got involved in making bookmarks, making patterned Elmers and talking about our emotions making bear faces from Goldilocks.

 We then shared stories with parents at the end of our morning and afternoon session. Thank you to all the parents who joined us, it was a wonderful experience for us all.

 

This week at Nursery 28th February 2025

We have had a wonderful week back after the half term break – the children have settled with positivity and happiness back into their nursery routines and we have welcomed some new friends to our setting too.

 Next week is Communication Week which is an annual event launched by the Bucks Early Years team and the aim this year is to…

Engage with Chat: Explore with Play: Read Together

The children will be taking part in a wide range of activities within nursery and there will be some exciting live streamed events that some of the children will be able to take part in when authors share their books with the children. This year Bucks have arranged for two of these fabulous opportunities and they are:

The Bear and the Piano – David Litchfield  10^th Anniversary of this award winning book. The author/illustrator David Litchfield is taking his Bear Band on a digital concert tour! David will read ‘The Bear and the Piano’ accompanied by live music from David and his Merry Band of Bears. After this special story time, stick around and create a piece of animal themed artwork.

The second, on Thursday, will be a chance to experience…

Are You a Hungry Monster? Gui Karsten is a hilarious interactive picture book that will have readers giggling and laughing along, as monster creates his legendary snack recipe!
Join author/illustrator Guilherme Karsten for an interactive reading of his new book, Are You A Hungry Monster? – with lots of stomping and roaring required from the audience! Guilherme will then show you how to draw the monster yourselves.

Throughout the week the nursery team will share, as always, lots of the fun things that have been taking place via our Famly app.

Next week’s newsletter will be full of photos and information about what we have done.

But first, here is this week’s news for you.

We’ve had a lovely first week back in the Chicks room. This half term our topic is ‘Rhyme Time’ and we will be focusing on a different nursery rhyme each week. All the children have been really enjoying our new daily singing time, choosing their own songs from our big bag of rhymes. 

 We have started off the half term by focusing on ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, which is a firm favourite amongst the children. Our big bus play tent has been very popular this week and the children have loved climbing into the tent and playing peekaboo from the holes in the top! The children have displayed great creative skills by designing their own red buses, using different pens, pencils and crayons to make marks before sticking on some windows and wheels. We have also used some toy buses dipped in paint to explore how the wheels make marks on the paper. On Friday we created some bubble wrap roads, the children loved pushing big buses across the bubble wrap to make lots of popping noises. This was a fantastic activity to help develop the children’s fine motor skills too, as they experimented with using their forefingers to pop single bubbles. 
During the week we have spent lots of time outside. All the rain from the weekend made some great puddles for splashing in on Monday! The children were also fascinated as we went out during the rain on Wednesday, we love being able to expose the children to all kinds of weathers to enhance their learning. We have read books out in the sunshine and also went to play on the schools climbing equipment too, it really has been such a busy week. 

A reminder that next week we will be opening up the Chicks room for our parents to come a chat, play and read with their children on Monday and Thursday from 9 till 10. We are hoping that you will all be able to join us across these two days. 

 

This week in the Cygnets room we have been focusing on under the sea. The children enjoyed making their own under the sea scene by sponge painting and sticking different sea animals down on their plate.

 We have also been doing a lot of hand and feet printing to make jellyfish and starfish which the children thoroughly enjoyed. This week in the tuff tray the children had to find the different sea creatures in blue shredded paper. As the weather has been sunny the children loved playing in the water splashing and making the animals swim.

The Swans have been talking about their favourite places to visit which included the beach, zoo, soft play, park and farm. We have been balancing, swinging & climbing on the amazing equipment by the KS1 playground. We also had a very noisy morning in the hall when we were making noises and moving like animals from the zoo and the farm. The children have been building sandcastles and decorating some very colourful flags to place on top of them. There was a lot of fabulous teamwork and sharing observed during this activity. Our book corner has lots of animal stories this week, one of our favourites is “Dear Zoo”. We have also been singing lots of songs about monkeys, Old McDonald and animals washing their clothes.

 Even the rain couldn’t stop us from having fun! We put on our coats and wellies then went outside to jump in puddles. The children and adults got a bit wet but there was lots of laughter.

 

We were so happy to welcome back all the Pre-School children after half term, they were excited to come back and talk about all the fun they had over the break.
This half term we are exploring our favourite things, we have started this with our favourite senses looking at all 7. (Smell, Sight, Touch, Taste, Hearing, Balance (Vestibular) and Awareness of ourselves and surroundings (Proprioception).
We have been exploring this with the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty, the children have been talking about eggs, we have seen what happens when a raw egg falls and cracks and compared this to a boiled egg.
One of the children also has eggs hatching at their house, so we have been having daily chick updates, seeing how many chicks have hatched.
We have also been listening to the different sounds linked to the rhyme, horses galloping to the rescue and people in crowds talking and shouting.
The children have also been talking about ways to mend Humpty Dumpty, we made paper eggs which we used different ways to 'break' cutting, ripping and scrunching, and then used different materials such as glue, sellotape and plasters to 'put him back together again'.
The children also had fun experimenting with different materials to create a protective suit for Humpty and then recreated him falling off the wall and seeing if the boiled egg cracked! There were lots of different ideas, some worked really well.

 We have also been learning Makaton, our sign of the week is 'milk', with children using both hands to milk an imaginary cow.

This week at Nursery

7th February 2025

Another amazing week at Buckingham Primary Nursery has simply flown by, we have had a very busy time full of colours.
This week has marked Children's Mental Health week, which this year takes on the theme of Know Yourself, Grow Yourself. It highlights the importance of self-awareness in developing resilience, confidence and emotional wellbeing. In our nursery we understand the importance of empowering the children to recognise how they are feeling and to be able to express it. As you read this week’s newsletter you will see how each room has embraced this to equip our children with the necessary tools for their future.

Please remember that next week, on Friday 14^th February, we have our INSET day. Nursery will be closed to all children as is the main school. The following week, beginning Monday 17^th February, will be half term for our term time only children.

 

It has been very shiny in the Chicks this week, with our focus being on the colours silver and gold. On Monday we used some playdough cutters dipped in paint to make lovely starry pictures, we sprinkled on some glitter to make the stars sparkle - they are so beautiful! We have also experimented with painting on our silver sensory pebbles, the children showed great coordination to be able to hold a pebble in one hand and use the paintbrush in the other hand to paint it. We have also decorated some biscuits with icing and some golden sprinkles this week, we hope they tasted as good as they looked! On Friday, the children have been busy hunting for golden stars in the black and silver sensory tray. 

Earlier in the week we went to explore in our natural area, where we were able to watch the branches of the trees swaying in the wind as well as listening to all the crunchy sounds of the leaves and twigs underneath our feet. We have also enjoyed spending time in the garden as well as a walk to the school playground to practice climbing on some of their larger equipment. 

This week in the Cygnets we have been learning about the colours brown, black and white. The children have enjoyed doing lots of craft activities such as hand print spiders and painting their own bears (polar bear, brown bear or black bear). This week’s favourite activity for the children was making Rice Krispie cakes! The children used their fine motor skills to mix, scoop and pour into the cupcake cases, however I think their favourite part was eating the Rice Krispies. In the sensory tray this week we have had hidden animals covered in cereals for the children to try and find. The sensory tent has also been a massive hit and the children LOVE to play inside and look at all the lights. As this week has been Children's Mental Health Week the children have enjoyed going on a mindful walk, talking about the colour monster and expressing their feelings through drawing.

 

This week in Swans we have been doing lots of activities which can help with our mental health. The children have loved doing Darth Vader, washing machine and flower breathing. We have also had lots of fun going on a bear hunt and Minion yoga session using our new screen. They children have also been talking about their feelings and what makes us feel the way we do. The children have listened to The Colour Monster story and then decorated large monsters. These now form a display in the Swans’ room so that we can refer to them and help the children to continue to be able to express and talk about how they are feeling – such an important skill to develop. We have been on a listening walk and also a walk to look for numbers around the school and grounds.

What a busy week we have had in Pre-School! We have been celebrating National Storytelling week and Children's Mental Health week.
Each day this week we have been listening to a variety of different stories such as Don't eat the Teacher, Wee Granny's Magic Bag and My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes. The children got to vote for which story they wanted to hear.

We have been practising lots of different mindful exercises each morning using techniques from the mindfulness teacher, we have been making relaxation rainbows, star breathing, bubble bounce observations and grounding activities. We have also been moving our hands to dough disco, a great way to develop fine and gross motor skills and developing muscles reading for writing.
In the garden the children have been making pancakes in the mud kitchen and exploring ice especially how it melts in the sunshine and on warm hands. They have also been exploring the musical instruments making beats and repeating patterns, and finding new and exciting ways of travelling down the slide.
Inside we have been getting messy in the cornflour, a fantastic Newtonian fluid which can be both solid and liquid. exploring how it moves and drips off our hands. We have also been looking at light and reflection using torches and coloured film to make projections on the walls and under a blanketed table.
Music is important in Pre-School, this week we have been talking about different styles of music, we listened to My Favourite Things from the Sound of Music, and talked about what makes us happy when we are feeling sad. We also listened to the Space Oddity sung by an astronaut on the international space station, talking about how he was floating, and we could see the earth from the window of the space station. 

On Numbers Day we had lots of fun with numbers, and joined in with a fun game using the song 5,4,3,2,1 Manfred. We also played number and counting games and made up counting patterns.

We had some surprises this week. Year 1 came into the nursery to show us the puppet books they had made about Humpty Dumpty, the children paired up with the nursery children showing them what they had made and telling the children the story of Humpty Dumpty.

The Year 6 pupil Mental Health Champions also visited Pre-School to make calming jars with them, after demonstrating what the children were going to make, the children worked in small groups with the mental health champions to make wonderful glitter filled bottles which we will be using in our reflection area.
Our fantastic mystery readers from year 6 this week came and shared one of our favourite stories, The Smartest Giant in Town which was beautifully read by Ivy and Aadvik came to share Aliens Love Underpants Save the World.

 

This week at Nursery

31st January 2025

Another spectacular week at Buckingham Primary Nursery. It had been full of colour and movement which has been a great contrast to the grey weather that we are continuing to have! I have been really impressed with the children’s manners this week during snack and mealtimes. We have children eating with us for all meals of the day and we are continually promoting good manners by using please and thank you when making food choices and also the polite conversations that take place when eating with friends. The children have developed super, sociable skills in this area and many are excellent role models to their peers.

What a fun week we've had in the Chicks room. This week we have been learning all about the colours red and yellow to tie in with celebrating Chinese New Year. The children have all had a wonderful time doing some jelly play throughout the week, using hands (and mouths!) to free the animals of the Chinese zodiac that were stuck inside. We have also been busy doing some sponge painting to create some paper plate snakes and designing some Chinese lanterns, working on our fine motor skills by using pencils and crayons to decorate them. 

At the beginning of the week we made the best of all the rain that the weekend's storm had brought us and went on a walk around the school hunting for puddles. We found some huge puddles which the children - and Kirsty - had the BEST time splashing around in. The children have also spent time exploring our sensory tray outside in the garden throughout the week and have liked naming and making the sounds for all the different animal pictures they found amongst the lentils. 

This week in the Cygnets we have been very busy. We have got our new lovely reading corner feeling very cosy and inviting for the children to read their favourite books. Our fun sensory area is finally complete with all different sensory toys and lights. We have enjoyed celebrating Chinese New Year this week including a spaghetti themed sensory tray which all the children enjoyed playing with. As this year is the year of the snake the children have made their own by painting on bubble wrap and transferring onto a plate to look like snake skin. The children have also enjoyed painting and making their own lanterns. During the week the Cygnets have enjoyed making their own marks and making handprints with the staff. We have been able to use the money that we have raised for a new sand tray which the children have LOVED!!

Next Friday (7th) it is National number day and National red day, we would love the children to dress up in red (could be as little as socks) or wear something with a number on or both.

This week the Swans have been learning about the Lunar New Year. We have had a puppet show about the race that decided the order of the animals in the Chinese calendar. We have been pleased to see the progress with the children’s listening and attention for activities like this. We also watched a clip about Chinese lion dancing which the children thoroughly enjoyed. To bring the festivities to life, we also had a good look at the dragon that the school children made many years ago. Although a little old now he is still vibrant and colourful and the children were delighted when the adults tried to make it dance! Inspired by this the children have also been dancing to Chinese music showing super coordination and great movements.

 Another busy week in Pre school. This week we have been celebrating the Lunar New Year.Gong Hei Fat Choyand Nongli Xinnian Kuaile to our Cantanese and Mandarin speakers. Chuc Mung Tet to our Vietnamese friends. The children have been making red playdough with gold glitter which has been squished and squashed this week into different shapes and sizes.
We have been experimenting with chopsticks, picking up pom poms and noodles, it has been fun trying different ways of picking up the pom poms and noodles, some children found it easy, others tried different techniques, such as the two hand pinch, or just picking up the noodles with their hands!
The children have been learning about the different animals of the zodiac, and the race which gave the animals the order they appear, we are celebrating the year of the snake. 

The children have also been interested in the dragon dances which are part of the celebrations, we had great fun pretending to be dragons and moving around the room under gold and red fabric, even Jane and Kerry joined in too many giggles were heard!
We have been getting creative this week making repeating patterned snakes, working on our mark making skills creating lucky red envelopes, we also used 2d shapes to design some fantastic looking dragons.
As part of our listening skills we have been listening to different types of music this week, we moved in different ways to Bjork's ‘It's Oh So Quiet’ making soft tip toe movements and then big loud movements when the music changed. Pre-school have also been talking about how different types of music makes us feel. We have been listening to Blue Train and El Jarabe Tapatio the Mexican Hat dance, there have been lots of discussions about stamping feet, clapping hands, moving fast and moving slow.
We would also like to thank the many year 6 children who were mystery readers this week. Lacey who read a pre-school favourite ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’, Jerald who read ‘Angelo’ by Quentin Blake and Ashvi who read ‘Paddington and the Tower’. The children really love having visitors to the nursery to read stories, they also enjoy giving the children Thank You certificates for coming.

 

This week at Nursery

24th January 2025

Another wonderful week at nursery for all of our children, they have had a fabulous range of opportunities to enjoy including black and white sensory play, fun decorating biscuits with icing, making pine cone bird feeders and noticing some signs of Spring in the Pre-School garden.

 

This week in the Chicks we have been learning all about the colours black and white. The children had lots of fun getting messy playing with the shaving foam on Monday, although the grownups had the best time too! We have used a variety of different craft materials throughout the week including paints and chalks and have made some fantastic pieces of artwork - everyone has been very creative. On Friday we created a black and white sensory tray using rice, beans and lentils. The children had a great time exploring all the textures and listening to the different noises they made when shaking filled pots. 

The children have enjoyed spending time outside too and enjoyed all the different school playground equipment. So that we didn't get blown away by the winds on Friday, we let off some steam doing some soft play. It was so much fun building towers and crawling through the tunnels. 

 

The colours for this week are Purple and Orange in the Cygnets. We have had lots of fun with our sensory play this week which has included orange cornflour and purple and orange pasta & rice. The children have really enjoyed these activities and have loved using their fine motor skills for pouring and scooping. Another favourite for the children was decorating biscuits with purple and orange icing which they enjoyed having at home. During the week the children had the opportunity to go into the hall and enjoy soft play, the children loved building towers, going under and over the soft play and making different shapes with the equipment.

 

This week the Swans have been decorating biscuits to make an edible Very Hungry Caterpillar. We have also been threading some very long caterpillars which has been developing our fine motor skills beautifully. To help to feed the birds in our gardens, we have been making our very own bird feeders out of pine cones. They look amazing and we are sure that the birds will enjoy them! We look forward to seeing if they have been pecked and which birds come to visit.

 
Another busy week in pre-school, this week we have been inspired by the herbs and daffodils which we planted in our garden at the beginning of term. The children noticed green shoots and leaves.
To encourage their learning and interests we have been looking at videos of how plants grow, and naming parts of plants, we have also been exploring beans and pulses in our sensory tray.
We also read the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which created great opportunities for role play, retelling the story, we also collected some Magic Beans and decided what would happen if we planted them, what would grow, many children decided that the beanstalk would be full of their favourite treats such as sweets, lollies, toast and jam and even apples and bananas! We were also interested in harp music based on the story and listened to some while pretending to play the harp.
The pre-school children also made their own playdough this week, following the recipe, with lots of measuring and mixing before they began to play with it. We have been playing lots of games inside such as connect four, shopping lists and snakes and ladders, this is a wonderful way for children to work together, take turns and enjoy shared experiences.
This week we had Ruby come in from Year 6 as our mystery reader, she confidently read the story of Harry and the Robots, the children listened beautifully, they are really enjoying this experience.

 

 

This week at Nursery

17th January 2025

 

Another fantastic week at nursery has flown by. The children have had an amazing time with fun and laughter filling the rooms. Highlights for me have been to see dinosaurs stomping through paint, a new climbing frame being explored, an amazing Hungry Caterpillar display created through children collaborating beautifully and to see the fun that can be had sitting amongst spaghetti and being allowed to eat it!

 We've had another fun-filled week in the Chicks room. This week we have been focusing on the colours green and blue and our small world frog pond has been very popular! The children have joined in with a variety of activities this week working on their fine motor skills and exploring lots of different textures too. We have made towers with playdough, scooped, dangled and eaten lots of spaghetti and have even been busy popping some peas too! The children have created some beautiful pictures by painting with cardboard tubes which we are looking forward to adding to our display board. We also had a go at trying to make marks with some coloured ice, it was very cold and slippery though! The children have continued to enjoy playing in our outdoor spaces, including going for walks around the school site and showing off their wonderful climbing skills on some of the playground equipment.  

This week in the Cygnets room we have been learning about the colours green and blue. The children enjoyed painting their own ponds with sponges and then using their fine motor skills sticking the frogs on top. The children have also enjoyed decorating all the different colour monsters using different craft resources. We have had a lovely new climbing frame inside which the children have LOVED, they have enjoyed trying to balance and try new skills. We have also been outside a lot where the children have really enjoyed jumping on the trampoline.

 This week in Swans we have been learning about growth. The children have enjoyed listening to The Very Hungry Caterpillar story which has helped us to understand the life cycle of a butterfly. We have made our very own large life cycle of a butterfly display. We have also been feeding our caterpillars all of the food from the story until they feel very poorly. We are also playing a variety of games to help up to practice our turn taking skills.

 What a busy week in Pre-School! We have been continuing looking at growing, looking at measuring ourselves in lots of different ways. We made a height chart to see how tall we were, measured our feet in the shoe shop role play and compared the lengths of different objects in the room. Pre-School have also been interested in dinosaurs, we have been palaeontologists looking for dinosaur bones in the sand tray with brushes and singing dinosaur songs and dancing like them too! 

 

We enjoyed a walk about the school and visited the school library for storytime. At the end of the week we got messy making footprints to look at our feet and see the different sizes our feet are, it was very cold and slippery in the paint but good fun, the adults joined in too. We have joined up with Year 6 this term, who are going to be our mystery readers. We had Harry visit this week and read We're Going on a Bear Hunt. The children were really excited to see someone from school come and read and I have never seen the children so quiet during the story. Thank you Harry.

This week at Nursery
10th January 2025

A Happy New Year to you all and, despite the freezing weather,  a very warm welcome back to nursery.

It has been wonderful to see the children settling beautifully into their routines and having fun with their friends. A particular mention to the children who have started in a new room; they have coped beautifully transitioning successfully and making lots of new friends already.
The weather has been super cold but this has allowed us to take part in lots of fun, wintery activities. The children have enjoyed exploring our beautiful school site and seeing patterns in the frost and ice and they have thoroughly enjoyed playing with the ice that has formed during the night.

 

What a wonderful first week back at nursery we have had. This half term we are focusing on the topic of colours in the Chicks room and have started off by looking at all the colours together in a rainbow. We have done some sticking to make beautiful rainbow pictures and explored some coloured bubbly foam too. We created a sensory tray, making a rainbow from coloured oats which was so much fun. The children loved scooping the oats up with their hands, throwing them and sprinkling them from heights too. The children's favourite activity this week though was our edible painting, using natural yogurt mixed with food colouring. The children loved doing some painting and thought it was fantastic that they could eat the paint too, it must have been very tasty!
Despite the cold weather we have enjoyed playing outside daily too. The children like to explore the garden, looking at the leaves and riding around on some of the toys. We went for a walk around the school site during the week where the children loved being able to wave to the people they saw. Please do remember to send your child with a suitable all-in-one suit, hat, gloves and wellies where appropriate to ensure that we are able to continue making the most of our wonderful outdoor areas. 

 

 

This week in the Cygnets the children have been looking at all the different colours of the rainbow. They have enjoyed creating their own Elmer the elephant by sticking or painting. The children have also enjoyed our new sensory area in the room, playing with different textures and looking at different lights. In our home corner the children have loved roleplay in our doctors’ surgery using all sorts of different equipment. Thankfully we have some highly skilled children who are able to cure a range of different ailments! As the weather has been a lot colder, we went outside to explore the ice which the children loved feeling.

 

 

Welcome back from Swans! This week the children have enjoyed telling us all about what they have had for Christmas. We are so proud of their developing abilities to share thoughts and news and also to sit and listen to what their friends are saying. The Swans have been very excited to  explore our outdoor area and talk about the ice. The children have been using lots of different words to describe the texture of ice. We have been on a special walk to visit the school library and we listened to a story about a snow king

 

 

 

 

What a welcome back! It was so fantastic to see the children coming back into pre-school this week relaxed from their winter break and excited to talk about what they have been doing.
We also had the excitement of a new area for preschool room, over the winter break the builders have been in and we now have a hard floor area which the children are calling the 'active zone' this means more sensory activities are available to them during the day.
This week we began our new topic of growing and spring. We are currently looking at how we grow, comparing baby photographs of ourselves and how we look today. We have been watching time-lapse videos of babies from birth to 1 year old and talking about what we can see and hear.
We have also been measuring lines using different units of measurement such as cubes, pom poms and shells, which the children have enjoyed and discovered new ways to find out something's length.
In the outside space with the very cold weather we have been exploring the ice and frost. This has involved some 'risky play' as surfaces can be slippery, the children have been demonstrating their safety skills testing surfaces before walking on them. The children have been experimenting and exploring the ice, with some children trying to melt the ice by bringing it inside to see if they could turn it back into water!
Finally, a big thank you to our Mystery Readers from the end of last term, the children really enjoy this. Thank you to Florence's Daddy, Father Christmas and Maggie from Year 3 who came in to share a story.

 

 

 

 

 

Final week of term 20th December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week at Nursery 13th December 2024

Another wonderful week at Buckingham Primary Nursery. It certainly is beginning to look a lot like Christmas and we have welcomed many of you in to the nursery to celebrate with us. The rooms are looking magical as we display the children’s creations and decorate our room doors for some festive fun – I have the Chicks team to thank for mine!
A reminder from me that all nursery children break up next week on Friday 20^th December, please remember to look at the Christmas dates that were sent out, the all year round children return on Thursday 2^nd January and the term time only children on Monday 6^th January.

 

What a fun-filled, festive week we've had in the Chicks room! We have continued making lots of beautiful Christmas crafts this week. We created some lovely pictures, using brushes with jingling bells attached - the children were so fascinated at the different noises they were able to hear as they painted. We also used some corks and our hands to decorate some lovely snowflakes to add to the decorations in our room. Outside the children have been busy exploring with some carrots and brussels sprouts to create some 'Christmas soup', the children demonstrated some great scooping and mixing. On Wednesday we were so lucky, Father Christmas came to visit in his sleigh! The children liked shouting to wake him up before waving hello. 

This week everyone was invited to the Chicks Christmas party, everyone had the best time. We did lots of dancing to the Christmas music and ate so many wonderfully decorated biscuits! We're looking forward to the final week full of much more Christmas fun. 

 

This week on the Cygnets the children have created reindeer food and using their fine motor skills to scoop and pour. In preparation for our Christmas door competition the children have enjoyed decorating all the components needed to make a gingerbread house. The children have also enjoyed exploring playdough using natural objects such as logs, pine cones and Cinnamon to make different shapes and exploring different smells. To celebrate National Christmas jumper day we also decorated our own jumpers too.

 

The Swans & Pre-School children came together for Christmas crafts & a sing-a-long, we had so much fun. We would like to thank all of the family members that joined us to make it such a special event, it was so lovely to see you all. We have also had a very special visitor & helpful elf come to see us, the children were so excited to see them. The children have been very busy making a paper chain Christmas tree, snowflakes & snowmen to enter into the Christmas door competition held across Nursery & School. We enjoyed a walk around the school to look at all of the beautifully decorated Christmas trees, we counted 28 in all!

 

What a busy and exciting week in Preschool. We have continued to create lots of fun Christmas crafts using clay, paint and glue to share with our families for Christmas.

We also had our first parent craft and Christmas sing along, it was wonderful to see families working together icing and decorating biscuits, making snowflake crowns and Christmas decorations. The children were fantastic singing Christmas songs in English and Ukrainian, and also signing songs using Makaton.

Our mystery reader this week was Margo the Elf, it was very exciting and she read One Warm Fox a Percy the Park Keeper story bringing in Mrs Fox. 
We had a special visitor to the Nursery, Father Christmas arrived in his sleigh and the children all found out they were on the Nice list, however the grown-ups were not, so the children will be keeping an eye, to make sure they are making good choices before Christmas.

We have also enjoyed a cold winter walk around the school, and made 'hot chocolate' with shaving foam and cocoa powder, which smelt delicious and was very messy!

At the end of the week we celebrated Saint Lucia Day, who as legend has it, brought food to Christians hiding in Roman catacombs, lighting her way with a candle lit wreath on her head. The children made crowns of candles and then took treats to the nursery staff, to say thanks.

This week at Nursery 6th December 2024

Another fabulous week at Buckingham Primary Nursery has flown by and I am so happy to see the sunshine today before the wind and rain at the weekend!
The children have had a successful and happy week and have been doing lots of seasonal activities. Today I spent a wonderful morning with the Swans. They had been busy creating some letters to post to Santa and we had a stroll in the sunshine to the post-box. When we got there, we met Martin the Postman and he told us that our letters would go all the way to the North Pole for Santa and his helpers to read. Thank you, Martin, for your help this morning.

We've had a very busy week in the Chicks room. We've had so much fun getting into the Christmas spirit and making lots of fantastic Christmas crafts. The children have loved being able to make marks to design their own stockings and doing lots of sticking to make some very sparkly Christmas trees - our room is going to be looking so beautiful with all these decorations! The children have also had so much fun working together to decorate our felt Christmas tree with the velcro decorations. Everyone has enjoyed looking at all the lovely new Christmas books throughout the week, especially the musical books because who doesn't love listening to the same part of a Christmas song over and over to have a dance to!

We are really looking forward to our Chicks Christmas party next Thursday (12th) and would love to see all the children and their parents come along to join in the festivities. Please do remember to return the reply slip which has been sent home with your child as soon as possible.

 

In the Cygnets room this week we have been busy doing lots of Christmas crafts. We have made snowflakes, Christmas trees and even written to Santa with our wish list. The children have really enjoyed experimenting with and using lots of colourful resources for their craft. Firm favourites have been glue and paint, our room is becoming very festive! We have enjoyed learning and singing some Christmas songs. We have updated our book area and we have all loved choosing stories and reading together. The children are loving hearing some of the stories several times and can now join in with some repeated phrases which is wonderful to hear.

 

The Swans children are entering into the Christmas spirit making cards, decorations and practising our songs for the sing-a-long. This week they have really impressed us with their developing fine motor skills and their ability to choose and use a range of resources. Good sharing and turn taking have also been an important part of our activities this week. We have made letters for Santa and were very excited to take a walk to visit the post-box especially when we met a lovely postman called Martin who told us all about what would happen to our letters. We were extremely proud of the way that the children walked together and listened so well to adult instructions – well done to the Swans!

 

Can you believe we are already in December? Christmas has begun in the Pre-School room. The children have been busy in the mark-making area creating beautiful snowflake patterns using glitter, paintbrushes or just their fingers, they have also been writing letters to the big man himself FC. They have also been getting creative making Christmas decorations.

We have also been counting down the days with our interactive advent calendar, this is a great way to encourage children to think about numbers and use their fingers to show numbers as well as recognise and name them.

On Tuesday we took a trip to the natural area where, after doing a safety check using our eyes, ears and feet to check that the area was safe, we decided where to place our frog home and hedgehog house for our night-time visitors over the winter. We filled the house with hay and also put in some hedgehog dinner.

The school children invited us to see their Nativity performance which was lots of fun, especially with the rest of the school, and the children enjoyed the singing.

At the end of the week we celebrated Saint Nicholas Day, the children cleaned their shoes and placed them in our nursery hub. The children then 'went to sleep' with a bedtime story the night before Christmas, and when they 'woke up' they found that Saint Nicholas had left a small treat in their newly cleaned shoes.

 

This week at Nursery 29th November 2024

Another fabulous week at Buckingham Primary Nursery full of fun and laughter and a little bit of Christmas magic arrived today too!

The weather has been quite mixed but it gave us lots of opportunities to explore seasonal change; we played with frost and ice yesterday and in the sunshine with blue skies today.

The children have been playing and learning beautifully in all of the rooms and are making lovely progress. Today I supported the Pre-School children for lunch and I was so impressed with their super manners and their successful ability to learn and adapt to new routines. They were telling me all about their morning which had included putting up and decorating not one, not two but THREE Christmas trees! They are so proud of what they have created and so are we – they look spectacular. The other three nursery rooms have all received a little bit of Christmas sparkle from post boxes to winter igloos complete with white sock snowballs; we are so looking forward to spending time in them over the next few weeks.

This week in the Chicks’ room we have been learning all about winter. The children have had a fantastic time playing in the 'igloo' throughout the week, admiring the twinkling lights and practicing throwing the 'snowballs'. We have been busy doing some sticking to make some lovely snowball pictures, they looked so effective. To round off the week, in the absence of any real snow to play with, we created a snowy sensory tray with arctic animals and paintbrushes for mark making - the children had a great time! Throughout the week we've also been working with the children doing some secret crafts that we can't wait to share with you!

The Cygnets have also been busy playing and having lots of fun this week. This week we have been looking at the weather and how the leaves look and feel. We have been busy exploring with the leaves in the tuff tray and adding all different animals. Lots of fun was had throwing the leaves up into the air and watching them all land on the floor. We have also used paint and some of the leaves to do leaf printing. The pictures the children created are wonderful – we were very proud of their focus and concentration during this activity.

In Swans this week we have been busy doing lots of painting, creating our own post box for the children to send their friends a Christmas card. We also made a fireplace ready for Santa to visit. The children have been looking at the changes to water when the temperature gets colder. We have made some flags to celebrate St Andrews day & had an extra special snack of Scottish Shortbread biscuits after our fruit & milk. It's also “beginning to look a lot like Christmas" in our room because we have been decorating our Christmas tree, it looks amazing!

The pre-school children have had a fun week.

With the continuing cold weather, we have been exploring ice in the garden, observing it melt, finding tools to break the ice and talking about its cold and slippery texture.

The children went on a walk around the school looking at the change of the season, and then practiced their balancing skills on the tyres and hanging bars on the school playground.

We are also getting ready for Christmas practising our Christmas songs, and we have been using our scissor skills to start making decorations for the room. Including decorating three Christmas trees!
Pre-school children enjoy playing with playdough. We measured out the different ingredients to make playdough, mixed it together and then had fun rolling, squeezing and cutting out shapes.

We were very lucky to have two mystery readers this week.

Annie's Mummy read Stickman, a crowd favourite, and Angus' Daddy read a selection of stories including Don't put your finger in the jelly Nelly, which had the children giggling!

 

 

This week at Nursery
22nd November 2024

We have had a most wonderful time at nursery this week. I have seen such fun and laughter through the children’s play and exploration. The snow on Tuesday was a wintery wonder. All of our children went outside and walked around our beautiful school site looking at the changes that the snow had brought. The first photo in this week’s newsletter is the smallest, cutest snowman I have ever seen made by Kirsty our Chicks room lead – he was only six centimetres tall. With the weather remaining incredibly cold on Wednesday the children thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with ice, lots of scientific thinking and understanding seasonal change and temperature. It was fantastic. Alongside this we had a focus on road safety with the children learning how to cross the road safely and use a zebra crossing.

 

The Chicks have had another brilliant week in nursery. This week we have been celebrating Road Safety Week, the children have loved playing with the vehicles and people in the tuff tray as well as doing some sticking to make their own traffic lights too, we even tested out our road safety skills on a walk around the school. The snow provided some fantastic entertainment for the children (as well as Kirsty and Hayley!) earlier in the week as they enjoyed picking up the snow to explore how cold it was and making crunching footprints as they walked around. 

We were so pleased to be able to run two stay and play sessions this week too. It was fantastic to have so many of our parents come and join in the fun and get the chance to see just what we get up to in the Chicks room! We hope all the parents enjoyed it as much as we did and look forward to running more sessions like this in the future

 

This week in the Cygnets we have been talking about road safety. We went on a walk around the school and used the zebra crossing to teach the children road safety. The children really enjoyed decorating biscuits to look like traffic lights they concentrated on the decorating showing good fine motor skills as they worked; they tasted delicious too!

 

In Swans this week we have been having lots of fun exploring the texture of the snow & ice. We have also spent some time learning and talking about road safety. We made our own zebra crossing and the adults had a little accident. Luella was driving her pink car and did not look or stop at the zebra crossing, poor Mrs Aris was knocked down and hurt her leg! Please note that Mrs Aris was not hurt, the car was not damaged and Luella was not arrested for dangerous driving! The children however can now talk with knowledge about road safety which is marvellous.

 

Wow! What an exciting week we have had in preschool. This week we have been exploring vegetables, the children have enjoyed using their senses, looking at broccoli, onions and potatoes.
Snow came on Tuesday, we enjoyed having a winter walk around the school, then having short plays in the snow before we all got too cold. This has been a great opportunity for the children to develop their independent skills putting on coats, hats and gloves.

The children were also fascinated by the ice which had formed the following morning, with lots of fun melting and feeling the ice, and also painting it.

We had a fantastic mystery reader; Reuben's grandmother came with a basket full of surprises as she read Walking through the Jungle and This is the Bear. The children loved this; thank you for your continued support with this.

 

We also have ended the week making vegetable soup, the children deceloping their knife skills cutting up the vegetables and then waiting for it to cook in the soup maker. We enjoyed this is cups with breadsticks.

 

This week at Nursery
8th November 2024

Welcome back to Nursery, we hope you all had a very happy half term break. We had a very busy half term; lots of fun was had in nursery for our all year-round children with plenty of spooky and pumpkin fun. The children even made their very own pumpkin soup which was a huge success!
Our building work dividing Swans and Pre-School rooms is complete and both rooms have had a bit of a makeover and are looking wonderful. Another fun week has flown by; the children settled quickly and confidently after their week off and those who moved rooms were secure and happy in their new spaces. Bonfire night and Remembrance have been covered in all rooms this week from making bangs with metal pots and pans to creating beautiful handprint poppy wreaths; we have had a super week.

A reminder and a request: we always ensure that we put the children in clean clothes if they have become messy or dirty. Would you please ensure that your child comes to nursery with some spare clothes in their bag? Many children have borrowed nursery clothes but unfortunately these have not been returned to us and we are now running low on spares. If you have some nursery clothes we kindly request that you return them, we would be most grateful.

This week in the Chicks we've had great fun learning all aboutBonfire Night. We started off the week by making some breadstick sparklers with melted chocolate and sprinkles, the children were fantastic at dipping their breadsticks into the chocolate and swirling it around - they made a super tasty treat too! We've made lots of wonderful firework pictures too, with both paints and chalks that have made our displays look very colourful. Throughout the week the children have loved making lots of loud bangs like fireworks with the metal bowls and wooden spoons, it's been very noisy! We finished off the week by having a go at using some paint brushes to make marks in the rice to uncover the colours underneath to design our own fireworks.

This week in Cygnets Room the children have enjoyed learning about Bonfire Night and making firework pictures. We talked a lot about the colours and the noises that fireworks make. The children really enjoyed using lots of different materials and techniques in their artwork. We used cut cardboard tubes to print colourful paint onto black paper and experimented with glue and glitter. We were very proud of our fireworks; they look sparkly and colourful.
All of the staff have been delighted with the progress that the children are making; after a week off for many they have all returned confidently and happily – we cannot ask for more!

This week in Swans room we have been celebrating Diwali by making Rangoli sun catchers. We have talked about the noises that fireworks make (we decided that bang, pop and fizz were fabulous ones!) and we enjoyed using our sticking skills and our cutting skills to make some bonfire and firework pictures. We very much enjoyed making some breadstick sparklers which were both colourful and delicious too. To commemorate Remembrance on Monday we have made a handprint poppy wreath which is beautiful and will be shared at the Remembrance Service on Monday 11^th with the whole school.

It was wonderful to see all the pre-school children back from half-term. We really enjoyed listening to their stories about fireworks, Halloween trick or treating and spending days with their families.
This half term we are focusing on Autumn and festivals which will lead up to Christmas and our Christmas sing-along.
This week the children have been talking about fireworks, the sounds they make and the colours, we made fireworks pictures and became fireworks dancing to music with colourful scarves.
We have also been talking about Diwali this week and had a surprise visitor to the nursery when a parent came in to show the children how to make Mehndi patterns on some of the grown-ups' hands using a special paste called Henna. The children were inspired to make their own patterns on paper hands.
We also had George's mum come in as our Mystery Reader this week to read Dogs Never Climb Trees, which the children enjoyed listening to. If anyone would like to sign up for this half term, sheets can be found outside pre-school and in Cygnets for early drop offs.
The children are also working on making a poppy wreath for our Remembrance festival which we will be attending on Monday 11th November with the rest of the school. The children have already been talking about the poppies which some of the staff have been wearing.

This week at Nursery
25th October 2024

 

If you have a child in Pre-School please do join us for one of our upcoming Open Mornings. We would love to see you there.

 

School Open Mornings

Friday 15th November
Appointments available 10:00am

Wednesday 8th January 2025
Appointments available 9:30am 

Have you got a child joining us in F2 in September?  Are you moving to the area and looking for a school place?  

We would like to welcome you to come and visit our school.  Join us for refreshments and school tours to see our wonderful open spaces, forest school, fantastic library, dedicated Performing Arts Room and more!  

Please visit the school website for the booking form.

For admissions enquiries contact us on admissions@bps.bucks.sch.uk

or telephone 01280 812864.

 

What an amazing half tern we have had at nursery – it has absolutely flown by. I have been delighted and impressed with the children’s positivity, happiness and determination about everything that they do. I have seen friendships blossom and relationships develop. I am privileged to have the most amazing team of staff who plan and deliver an incredible range of opportunities to meet the needs of your children. Just this week I have seen giant cobwebs, a real pumpkin patch, an ENORMOUS spider, spooky ghosts in the breeze and an awful lot of slime and gloop! The week ended with another dress up day so we were surrounded with bats, princesses, pirates, and some adorable looking pumpkins. What fun!

 

 We would all like to thank you for your continued support and wish you a happy and peaceful half term break. We look forward to seeing our term time children again on Monday 4^th November following some building work to create a permanent divide between the Swans and Pre-School.

 

We've had another busy week in the Chicks room learning all about ourfavourite foods. We have explored food in lots of different ways, we used some apples to make marks in paint this week as well as designing our own donuts with paint and sequins. The best bit was definitely making our own chocolate rice cakes though! The children showed great pouring, mixing and scooping skills and loved having a little taste test too! We rounded off the week with lots of Halloween fun, the children loved exploring the different ways to move the pumpkins around and enjoyed feeling the different textures in the sensory tray.

 

The children in Cygnets have had another wonderful week, they have been enjoying lots of craft activities and have transformed their room completely with bunting, paper chains and the biggest spider ever! The windows have been decorated with the children’s sun catcher pumpkins which are quite beautiful. The children and staff in Cygnets ended the week with their dress up day and had an awful lot of fun!

 

 

In the Swans room we have had another amazing week.
We have been practising taking off, putting on shoes & coats so we will all be ready for any type of weather. Please do support us and continue this at home, we have been really pleased with the progress we have seen so far. Developing our interactions and playing well alongside our friends has been a focus this week. We have been playing turn taking games with the parachute which has been a fun way to practise these skills. The children have been making ghost & spider web decorations for Halloween; our room looks absolutely wonderful now!

 

Wow! What a week to end our first half term in preschool. We have been exploring with colour mixing, mixing paints and using pipettes and coloured water to see what colours we could create. This was inspired by our Autumn walk last week when the children were talking about the different colours they could see.
We planted out spring bulbs in our planters, exploring and talking about what flowers we will grow.
We made a spiders’ web with masking tape and put mini beasts inside for the children to retrieve using tweezers and our hands.
Lunchtime is a special time in Pre-School room, each day children set up for lunch putting on tablecloths and flower decorations. It is a very social time with the children and staff sitting together talking about healthy foods and sharing stories. We also practice our manners 'pleases' and 'thank yous'.

We have been very lucky having two mystery readers this week. Kirsty from Chicks room surprised the children reading the wonderful Bears Don't Eat Egg Sandwiches.
We also had Zachary's Auntie who added to our spooky day with The Dinosaur Who Pooped Halloween.

Thank you to everyone for your support this half term, coming in as mystery readers and dressing your children up for animals and spooky days. The children have really enjoyed this.

 

This week at Nursery
18th October 2024

Such fun again at nursery this week. the children have been telling us about their families and have been exploring all the colours that autumn has to offer. We have been making wonderful links with some of the oldest children in the school and had a super time playing in the school's huge new sandpit!

In Chicks this week we have been learning all about our favourite toys. Throughout the week we have looked at how we can use our favourite toys in lots of different ways, using some animals and vehicles to make marks with the paint, the children were great at saying the animal names and making some of the sounds. We even got some of our animals stuck in jelly and had to get them out, it was lots of sticky, tasty fun! The Chicks have loved exploring the soft play in the room this week too, working on their gross motor skills as they climbed on and off of the shapes and made big towers to knock over too.

In Cygnets we have been talking about our pets, following on from our families. We chatted about the fair and the changes that we have seen in the weather and the trees around us. We had lots of fun with falling leaves and we have loved seeing the squirrels who live in our trees coming and saying hello and collecting the acorns.

We have made some beautiful paper chain families and talking about our families and what we love to do with them – Ivy especially liked her holiday with her family!

 

In Swans this week we have been chatting all about babies. We went to visit the babies in our Chicks room and looked at the difference in size between us. We compared the size of us standing up, our hands and our feet. After that we visited our friends in Year 6 (they were very big!) and did the same with them.

We have been exploring autumn and had lots of fun looking at the colours of the leaves and how the conkers and leaves felt. We finished the week with a trip to the school library, we loved sharing books with our friends and our grown-ups.

 

In Pre-School on Friday last week the children enjoyed making sandwiches in preschool. We experimented with different types of cutlery to spread butter on the bread and had fun folding and cutting, but best was eating.

This week we have been developing our fine motor skills using rice and pasta pouring and emptying into containers and looking at volume, how much we could fill the containers and using 'full' and 'empty' language, we have also been developing our scissor skills and threading.

We were also very lucky to be the first to play in the new school sandpit and spent time exploring the cold wet sand with our hands, making patterns, shapes and handprints.

The children have been working hard on their NELI Preschool assessments and have been rewarded with stickers for their hard work.

 

 

 

 

 

This week at Nursery
11th October 2024

Another fantastic week at Buckingham Primary Nursery has flown by. We have embraced autumn this week and have been on lots of walks to explore the school grounds and look closely at seasonal change, the trees on our site are just beautiful. The autumnal weather with sunshine and showers provided us with the opportunity to put our puddle suits and wellington boots to good use!

We have been very busy in the Chicks this week. The children have loved exploring the ball pit, diving into it and decorating the room as they practice their throwing skills. We had great fun doing some edible painting with some coloured yogurt, it was super messy but super tasty too! Despite the wet weather we've spent lots of time outside too, lots of rain makes lots of fantastic puddle splashing opportunities!

This week in the Cygnets room the children have been talking about their pets at home. We have loved looking at the children’s photographs of their pets; thank you for sending them in. They are on display in the woodland hall and the children have had some super conversations about the pets, their names, what they like to do and of course how much fun they have with them. The children have thoroughly enjoyed potato paw printing and we were all delighted with the results.

This week the Swans children have been for a walk around the school grounds collecting leaves to make leaf foxes. The children amazed us with their careful choosing of the perfect leaf to make the shape of the fox’s head. Once we were back in our room they focussed perfectly and shared resources with each other to create their very own autumn fox – they are absolutely fantastic!  We have also been making potato print paws & birds feet. We have been having lots of fun blow painting crazy hair styles. Another super fun week for us all!

Pre-school have had a wonderful week. We have been exploring with tea leaves and teabags with lots of pouring, mixing and stirring, we will be continuing this next week with jugs and containers to pour.

We have had fun in the hall using the equipment to climb and jump and lots of water play in the garden. They children also have enjoyed the construction house with lots of building and fixing this week.

All of the planters in the garden are full of soil, we are just waiting for a day without rain to plant our bulbs and herbs which will make a fantastic addition to the garden. We also have been finding lots of wildlife in the garden and handling these animals very carefully.

 

Thank you to Ada's mum for coming in as our mystery reader and reading the story Moira Coo the Scottish coo that flew

 

You can see more photos of our fun this week on our gallery page.

 

This week at nursery 28.10.24 we have had super fun in all sorts of weathers.

The Chicks have loved splashing in the puddles and going for walks around our beautiful school grounds. They have been singing songs and exploring their outdoors area feeling the crunchy autumn leaves. Puddle suits and wellies have been worn a lot this week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cygnets have been exploring outside too noticing the differences in the weather from sunshine to rain and wind. When indoors they have enjoyed lots of sensory play. Play dough and paints have been great fun, the Cygnets have been teaching their babies how to make marks in play dough. Construction has been enjoyed and lots of buildings have been made with blocks.

In the Swans room the children have loved role playing in their home corner, lots of cooking, cleaning and chatter has taken place. The children have been talking about their families a lot and have shown their artisitc skills when creating their self portraits. This week the children have learnt some sign language for the colours of the rainbow - they really impressed us with how quickly they learnt some new skills.

Pre-School children have enjoyed the changeable weather which has involved collecting water in containers, splashing in puddles and listening to the sounds the water makes. They have also been exploring with rice and oats, measuring into containers and recognising numbers and quantity. For Europeamn Languages week the Pre-School children have been learning how to say hello in differnet languages and loved joining in with Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in French!

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Mystery Reader visited on Thursday and shared the wonderful 'Room on the Broom'  by Julia Donaldson with Swans and Pre-School, the children were completely spellbound - thank you so much Reuben's mummy.