News
This week at Nursery
13th February 2026
What an amazing half term it has been across the nursery! I am so proud of all the children for the progress they have made, the new skills they have developed, and the kindness and enthusiasm they show each day. From colourful creative experiences and outdoor adventures to friendship celebrations and growing independence, it has truly been a busy and rewarding few weeks for everyone.
A gentle reminder that it is half term next week and the nursery will be closed. We would like to wish our all year round children who are attending next week a fun-filled time! To all of our families, we hope you have a restful and enjoyable break, and we look forward to welcoming everyone back on Monday 23rd February for another exciting half term ahead.
The Chicks have had a very colourful end to the half term, combining all our newly learned colours to focus on rainbows. On Monday we created our very own rainbows by popping bubble wrap and watching the paint spread underneath, lots of noisy fun! Tuesday brought some colourful messy play as we created some taste-safe paint using natural yogurt and food colouring. We used brushes and our hands to spread the ‘paint’ around the table and of course, an edible activity wouldn’t be complete without a taste test!
There have been lots of opportunities for mark making throughout the week, using both paints and pens. The children have been experimenting with using different kinds of media, developing fine motor skills to hold their tools and hearing lots of language as we talked about all the bright colours. To end the week, we made a rainbow of oats in the tuff tray. This activity encouraged the children to explore new textures and was great for developing the children’s curiosity too.
Throughout the week we have spent lots of time outdoors. Lots of rain over the weekend meant lots of great big puddles to splash in on Monday and whilst out on a walk we stopped off to try out some of the school’s playground equipment too - it was great for climbing, swinging and playing peekaboo! The sandpit has continued to be a firm favourite in the garden and is becoming a great area for socialisation as the children begin to interact and work together to achieve things. We have had such a wonderful half term and can’t wait for lots more fun to come!
With Valentines Day fast approaching, Love and Kindness has been our theme this week in Cygnets.
Our focus has been to encourage communication, talking about the people we care about, sharing with our friends, taking turns, recognising emotions and how others are feeling and building our friendships.
Our activities have included making love pictures to give to someone special, which have included handprint flower bouquets, decorating hearts, heart printing and colour mixing with different shades of red and white to create pink shades.
Our messy tray has been used to explore red food colour and water with pipettes to turn a white heart created out of cotton pads red, oats and red lentils to explore with various objects, a tray filled with only red objects to focus on the intended colour and more.
Our cygnets have also engaged in some wonderful shared play in the home corner, making tea for each other, engaging in exploration with the sand tray in the garden, going on a journey together with the bikes and trikes and sharing stories and illustrations in books with each other.
We wish you all a restful half term break and look forward to a fun week next week with those attending.
This week in the Swans Room, we have been celebrating Love and Friendship Week, and it has been such a joy to see the children embracing the theme with kindness and enthusiasm. The children have been doing a wonderful job sharing toys and taking turns, demonstrating growing skills in cooperation and understanding the feelings of others. It has been lovely to observe them using kind words, inviting their friends to join in play, and working together during activities.
We have also enjoyed some special picnic experiences, which provided opportunities for the children to practice independence skills, such as helping to tidy up, sitting together calmly, and engaging in conversations with their friends.
During our creative activities, the children decorated pictures of people holding hands, sparking meaningful discussions about friendship, kindness, and caring for one another. They also designed beautiful friendship bracelets, carefully choosing colours and practising their fine motor skills.
We were also excited to begin our “Show & Tell” sessions this week. The children have shown growing confidence and communication skills as they shared their favourite toy or book with adults and peers. They are learning to speak in front of a small group, listen respectfully while others share, and ask simple questions. It has been wonderful to see their confidence shining through, and we are incredibly proud of how brave and expressive they have been.
Overall, this week has been filled with kindness, creativity, and growing friendships. The Swans have shown us just how capable they are of caring for one another, and we couldn’t be prouder of the progress they continue to make each day.
In Pre-School this week, we have been enjoying our Book of the Week, Toby and the Tricky Things by Lou Peacock. The story introduces us to Toby the elephant as he learns to manage the “tricky things” that come with growing up, including adjusting to life with a new baby sister. The children were very engaged in the story, and it led to lots of thoughtful discussions about siblings and family life. Thank you to everyone who kindly sent in photos — these really supported our conversations and helped the children make meaningful connections to their own experiences.
Our focus words this week were pour, big/small, tricky, and by yourself. We have been encouraging the children to try new skills independently, celebrating moments when they do things by themselves and feel proud of their achievements. There has been lots of learning around understanding feelings, building resilience, and persevering when something feels a little “tricky.” It has been wonderful to see the children growing in confidence and showing such determination.
The story also inspired plenty of mathematical language and exploration. We compared objects using big and small, practised ordering items from biggest to smallest, and enjoyed counting carefully by ourselves. The children are becoming increasingly confident in using mathematical vocabulary naturally within their play and activities.
With Valentine’s Day at the weekend, we also spent time sharing our thoughts about the people we love and care about. The children took part in some special crafts to celebrate, and it was lovely to hear them talk so warmly about their families and friends. It has been a week full of emotional growth, new skills, and proud achievements in Pre-School.
This week at Nursery
6th February 2026
We’ve had another busy and exciting week across the nursery, filled with creativity, exploration, and lots of learning through play. From shiny silver and gold discoveries in Chicks, to hands-on maths investigations in Cygnets, imaginative zoo role play in Swans, and teamwork and friendship learning in Pre-School. 
The children have been developing a wide range of skills while having plenty of fun. We’re delighted to share some highlights from each room and hope you enjoy seeing what your children have been getting up to this week.
This week in the Chicks room it has been very shiny as we learned all about the colours silver and gold. Our tuff tray full of silver items has been lots of fun to explore throughout the week, and the big mirror has been perfect for admiring ourselves and giving lots of kisses! On Tuesday we wrapped some toys in shiny, silver tinfoil for the children to unwrap. This activity was great for helping to develop the children’s fine motor skills and curiosity as they worked to remove the foil and spent time manipulating it in different ways such as scrunching and ripping.
The children have been busy making some beautiful stars too, dipping a shape cutter into some yellow glue before sprinkling on gold glitter - these pictures have made a wonderful addition to our display board. On Thursday the children set to work using paint to decorate our silver pebbles, carefully choosing their colours and using their brushes to make marks. We finished off the week with some sticking, using pieces of silver and gold paper to make some shiny star wands. Outside the children have enjoyed playing in both sunshine and showers throughout the week. Splashing in puddles has been a big hit as always, along with rolling balls and playing chase too.
This week our theme has been all about maths in Cygnets. We have explored shapes, colours, numbers, counting, size, orientation, problem solving and more! Our activities have included colour sorting with coloured blocks, exploring with coloured beans using our emptying and filling skills, building towers with blocks, looking at and comparing length and height, counting objects giving a number name for each object with counting in order 1-5, 1-10 and beyond. We've completed a variety of different puzzles, matching shapes to shapes and turning pieces to fit correctly in inset boards. Creativity has been investigated and explored with shape sponge painting, mixing colour with shaving foam and science experiments to create rainbows with skittles and water. We also included numbers to coincide with world number day on Friday with numbered dinosaur feet visuals to encourage number matching with dinosaurs.
Alongside these activities, our Cygnets have also enjoyed lots of free play in our garden, showing preferences with bikes, trikes and ride on toys, lots of stories with Stick Man being a popular choice and Wind The Bobbin Up being this week’s favourite choice of song.
We look forward to much more fun next week
This week in the Swans room we had a very exciting delivery from the zoo! The children were delighted to explore the animals and even climbed into the boxes, using their imaginations and developing their confidence and curiosity through play. They enjoyed lots of role play inspired by the story Dear Zoo, which supported their communication and language skills, encouraged turn-taking when sharing the enormous boxes and props, and helped them express their ideas and emotions.
We have been practising our pencil grip by following lines, loops, and circles on animal cards, helping to strengthen hand control and early writing skills.
The children also developed their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination by carefully threading string through holes around animal pictures, building patience and concentration.
Throughout the week, we shared songs and stories linked to our zoo theme, supporting listening skills, rhythm, and memory. It has been a super fun week full of learning, creativity, and confidence-building experiences!
This week the children in Pre-School have been having fun copying! Our focus text this week has been ‘Copy Cat’ by Ali Pye – it is a super book about friendship and understanding between 2 cats, Bella and Anna, looking at playground friendships and finding your own way. Bella loves Anna. In fact, Bella loves Anna SO MUCH that she wants to be just like her, and copies every single thing she does. But like all little kittens, Bella and Anna get into a bit of a tangle. Pre-School have explored the words ‘copy, practise, skip and together’ and have been encouraging and supporting each other when trying new and tricky activities such as skipping with a rope – which is very difficult! Lots of fun was had with copying games like ‘Simon Says’ and practising a hand clapping game.
The children have shown us great collaboration and teamwork when working together and Neli has been very impressed with the children’s listening skills and has picked lots of ‘Best Listeners’ to celebrate their focus. In Phonics this week we have been exploring Instrumental Sounds and Body Percussion, we have been hugely impressed with the children’s concentration and focus – well done everyone, another super week of fun and learning!
This week at Nursery
30th January 2026
It has been another busy and joy-filled week across the nursery, with every room buzzing with curiosity, creativity and learning. From our youngest children exploring colours, textures and mark making, to exciting themed play, imaginative storytelling and large-scale collaborative builds, the children have been fully immersed in hands-on experiences that support their development across all areas of learning. We have been especially proud of the children’s growing listening and attention skills, their enthusiasm for exploring new materials, and the way they are increasingly working together, sharing ideas and celebrating one another’s achievements. Read on to find out more about the fantastic fun and learning that has taken place in each room this week.
This week in the Chicks room we have been learning all about the colours black and white. Throughout the week the children have been engaged in a variety of different mark making activities incorporating our colours of the week. On Monday we had a go at using some chalks to make marks, the children demonstrated a good palmar grasp to hold the chalks of different sizes.
We have also experimented with using paintbrushes to move through flour in a tuff tray to make marks. It was very messy but the children really enjoyed moving the flour in different ways and feeling the textures! On Thursday we used some white paint and a scrubbing brush to get creative with. We are so impressed with the children's early listening skills, they pay such close attention to demonstrations and instructions to be able to replicate actions. We finished off the week by filling a tuff tray with some black turtle beans and white rice along with some cups and spoons. The children have enjoyed practicing their coordination skills to be able to scoop and pour the materials as well as exploring all the different textures with their hands.
Outside in the garden the sandpit has proved to be very popular this week. The children have spent a lot of time picking up the sand with their hands as well as using the different spades to scoop and move the sand. We have also liked moving the balls around the garden in different ways and are getting very good at rolling, throwing and kicking!
In the Cygnets' Room DINOSAURS have been our theme this week and what a lot of fun we’ve had with it!
We’ve created dinosaur feet using our own handprints, sponge painted some dinosaur silhouettes and stomped dinosaurs through paints to create dinosaur footprints as part of our art activities. Our messy play has seen the children exploring a dinosaur play tray, adding different objects each day for the dinosaurs to explore we’ve included oats and lentils to stomp through, lettuce and leaves to munch upon and bones to encourage spoken language and exploratory impulses.
Our physical activities have included stomping and movement to music, roaring like dinosaurs, development of fine motor skills and problem solving with dinosaur puzzles and our group times have been focussed on all types of dinosaurs and their similarities and differences from what they can do such as fly and what they can eat being carnivores, omnivores and herbivores.
We look forward to another great week next week!
In Swans this week we have been having wonderful woodland fun, exploring a range of woodland animals through creative, sensory and physical activities. The children have been practising their scissor skills as they carefully cut out animal masks and puppets, developing hand strength, coordination and concentration. They also enjoyed dressing woodland animals in warm winter clothes, which supported their fine motor skills, imagination and early understanding of seasonal changes.
We explored simple cooking by mixing melted chocolate and cereals to make bird nests, encouraging turn-taking, listening to instructions and talking about textures and changes. The children showed fantastic collaboration as they worked together, shared resources and waited patiently for their turn.
Through creative activities, the children used sponges to paint birds and then added feathers, eyes and legs. We also enjoyed reading a story about owls, and the children listened with great focus before moving around the room like owls flying and swooping, supporting their physical development, coordination and imaginative play.
We are incredibly proud of how well the children are developing their listening and attention skills, and how confidently they are beginning to work together, communicate their ideas and support one another during activities.
We have had enormous fun in Pre-School this week, with The Three Little Pigs as our focus story. The children explored new vocabulary including angry, hungry, build and blow, using these words confidently during play and discussions. Inspired by the story, the children worked together to build the most enormous den—so strong and sturdy that even grown-ups, pretending to be the Big Bad Wolf, couldn’t blow it down! Through building towers, gingerbread houses and experimenting with different materials, the children investigated structure, balance and strength, while developing fantastic collaboration, sharing and problem-solving skills.
The fun continued outdoors as the children explored large-scale construction using hay and blocks, and enthusiastically took part in the world’s biggest obstacle course, built by the whole Pre-School team. In phonics, the children enjoyed exploring Aspect 3 (body percussion) and Aspect 1 (environmental sounds), developing their listening skills, rhythm and sound awareness. It has been a week full of laughter, teamwork and impressive learning—and we are so proud of the children’s enthusiasm and creativity and look forward to lots more fun next week.
This week at Nursery
23rd January 2026
What a wonderfully busy and exciting week it has been across the nursery! From the Chicks exploring pink and purple through creative art, dressing independence and puddle splashing, to the Cygnets developing their physical skills through climbing, messy play, music and movement, there has been so much curiosity, confidence and skill-building on show.
Our Swans have been busy learning all about woodland animals with hands-on activities that supported fine motor and scissor skills, while Pre-School enjoyed a week inspired by Don’t Wake Up Tiger!, filled with role play, storytelling, counting, singing and brave performances. Adding to this special week, we were delighted to welcome Ofsted on Wednesday, giving us the opportunity to share all the wonderful things we do at nursery and celebrate our fantastic nursery community together. We are very much looking forward to sharing our report with you in a few weeks’ time.
This week in the Chicks room we have been learning all about the colours pink and purple. Throughout the week the children have loved exploring a variety of pink and purple items of clothing and footwear. We have been very impressed at the children's independence in trying to put on wellies and shoes as well as being able to communicate when they need adult support for dressing too. On Tuesday the children had a go at using some plastic bottles dipped in paint to make some flowers, everyone showed good strength to be able to hold the bottles and carefully followed demonstrations to dip and stamp with them.
The children have been investigating some real flowers too, we talked about the different colours, found out they were very tickly and also had a go at using our fine motor skills to pull petals. Continuing with the pink and purple theme we have been doing some painting with corks to make a bunch of purple grapes as well as some sticking with feathers to make pink flamingos.
Outside it has been very wet throughout the week, but for the Chicks that means it has been a great opportunity for splashing in puddles! We started the week by going for a walk around the school site where we were lucky to find some very big puddles to enjoy splashing in. Meanwhile, in the garden, the children have been having fun exploring the sandpit, practising their scooping and pouring as well as playing in the farm yard tuff tray.
What a busy week we've had in Cygnets this week focussing on developing and show casing our physical skills!
We've seen children that are able to express their problem-solving skills by climbing to reach items wanted, we've had throwing and catching skills, use of gross motor skills to strengthen body muscles and fine motor skills to develop hand muscles. Our activities have included creating a colour explosion with water balloons and food colourings, climbing equipment and play mats, messy materials such gloop and flour for exploration, music and dance, throwing and catching with balls and general free play in the garden with trikes, bikes, climbing frame, slide and balancing beams. We've had a great week with some new skills being explored and demonstrated and curiosity being shown.
We look forward to another fun and busy week next week.
In the Swans room this week we have been learning about woodland animals. We have been building nests for an owl and hiding a hedgehog under the leaves. The children have made hedgehogs using play dough, googly eyes and matchsticks which was a great way to develop our fine motor skills, squishing and squashing and then carefully adding hedgehog spines and eyes.
We have been practicing our scissor skills when cutting out animals to make puppets. The children made bird feeders using tubes, lard and bird food. Next week we are hoping to hang them up in the trees in our Natural Area where we are hoping to be able to watch the birds eating them!
This week in pre-school we enjoyed reading Don’t Wake Up Tiger! which inspired lots of fun learning experiences. The children loved hosting birthday tea parties, creating their own tiger masks, and taking part in role play where we carefully tried not to wake Tiger! We explored which objects float, sang plenty of songs, and enjoyed developing our counting skills.
The children also learned our new poem I Can Build a Snowman and were incredibly brave, performing it for others. We also want to thank Year 1 who shared their super Humpty Dumpty moving story books with the children. It was wonderful to see their very caring interactions and marvel at their creativity. What an amazing and busy week of learning and fun!
This week at Nursery
16th January 2026
Welcome to this week’s nursery newsletter! We have had a busy, fun-filled week across all rooms, packed with exciting learning opportunities, outdoor adventures and lots of smiles. One of the highlights of the week was our amazing Singalong with Gwen session on Wednesday, which was very much enjoyed by us all. Lots of parents came along and we hope they enjoyed it as much as we did. The children were captivated by the music, songs, instruments and puppets, creating a wonderful shared experience full of joy and engagement.
Alongside this, the children have been exploring colours, winter themes, imaginative play, early language, creativity and physical development, making the most of every moment both indoors and outdoors. We are so proud of the children’s enthusiasm and progress—please enjoy reading all about what they have been getting up to this week!
This week in the Chicks room we have been continuing with our colours topic, focusing on the colours blue and green. Throughout the week the children have been engaging with our small world frog pond, as we have talked about the blue water and the green frogs and trying to make the sounds of the frogs. Following this theme, we have used some green pens and paint sticks to make marks on our own frog pictures. The children have shown great skill to be able to hold the writing tools and were very decisive when choosing which items to use. We were very fortunate to be able to attend Singing Gwen's singalong session on Wednesday. The children all thoroughly enjoyed the experience, listening to new songs and rhymes and exploring the different instruments and puppets too.
This week we have spent a lot of time outside, in all winds and weathers! The children all love to be outside and are starting to become much more aware of which are their own coats and wellies to put on. There have been lots of games of peekaboo in the house as always and there has been lots of interest in the scuttlebugs too - riding them around and experiments with making the wheels spin too.
This week in Cygnets, we have continued with our 'winter' learning theme. We have spent some great exploring times in our natural area looking at ice that has been created naturally overnight in our cold temperatures, we have created some lovely winter pictures using white, blue and silver resources and kept ourselves warm with some action games and soft play.
Our Cygnets have enjoyed lots of other activities including ice and water play, colour mixing, fine motor skill development using a variety of different tools and lots of exploration with play doh to help develop hand muscles. We are very much looking forward to another very busy week next week with our dear little Cygnets.
This week we have been talking and learning about animals from the Arctic and Antarctic. In our tuff tray, the children have been exploring large pieces of ice to represent icebergs, using their senses to touch, feel and describe how cold and slippery they are. They have been fascinated to observe the ice changing throughout the day, developing their curiosity, early scientific skills and language as they talked about what they could see happening. The children thoroughly enjoyed imaginative play with a variety of animals, climbing on the ice, building homes for them and even pretending to eat the ice.
We have also been discussing how people and animals keep warm during winter, helping to build understanding of the world around them. To extend this learning, the children made colourful mittens, strengthening their hand-eye coordination and creative skills, while taking pride in their work and showing great enjoyment in the activity.
This week in Pre-School we have had lots of fun exploring our book of the week, Pip and Posy and the Bedtime Frog by Axel Scheffler, which helped us talk about kindness, friendship and staying over at someone else’s house. We focused on our special words pack, forget, excited and giggle, developing both our language and personal, social and emotional skills. The children enjoyed packing suitcases and discussing what we pack for school and in our packed lunches. When learning about forget, we looked at pictures and talked about what might be forgotten, such as a helmet for riding a bike or an umbrella on a rainy day. Linking to PSED, we explored the feelings excited and giggle and held a very funny face contest – everyone was fantastic at making their friends laugh! We also made the most of the different weather this week, spending time outdoors using construction planks and crates to create some fabulous obstacle courses, building confidence and physical skills. In phonics, we listened carefully to environmental sounds both indoors and outdoors and enjoyed describing animal sounds. A super week of learning and fun – well done everyone!
This week at Nursery
9th January 2026
Welcome back and Happy New Year to all our families! We hope you had a restful and enjoyable Christmas break. It has been wonderful to welcome everyone back to nursery this week and to meet some lovely new children and families who have joined our setting – we’re delighted to begin getting to know you all. Despite an interesting (and very chilly!) week of winter weather, our rooms have been full of warmth, laughter and excitement.
From snowy outdoor adventures and icy explorations to colourful, creative activities and sensory play, every room has been buzzing with curiosity and fun. It has been a fantastic first week back, and we’re so proud of how well all the children, both new and familiar, have settled back into nursery life.
We’ve had a great first week back in the Chicks room. We were so pleased to welcome everyone back after the Christmas break and we’re so proud of how both our old and new children have settled back into nursery life. This half term we are going to be learning all about colours in the Chicks room, starting off with focussing on the colours red and yellow. To start the week the children had a go at using some yellow pencils, pencils and crayons to make marks on a circle before sticking on some pasta shape to create a sunshine with its rays. We have also been exploring with some red paint, using half of an apple to dip in the paint and stamp onto paper. The children loved looking at the different marks they had made and using their hands to spread the paint around too. The favourite activity of the week was definitely our red and yellow rice sensory tray. We added in some cups and spoons for the children to practice their coordination skills as they scooped and poured the rice. The children also experimented with using their hands to pick up and move the rice as well as swiping it across the tray.
It has been an incredibly cold week outside, but we have still enjoyed getting suited and booted to explore. Everyone was fascinated by the snow at the beginning of the week, we've been busy making footprints in the fresh snow as well as using our hands to clear snow from the toys too.
Happy New Year to all our families, we hope you all had a very restful and peaceful break. We have welcomed some new children to the Cygnets room and are very much looking forwards to watching them flourish and develop further in their learning journey.
This week, we have focussed our activities on the very suitable theme 'Winter'. Our Cygnets have had the chance to explore with naturally formed ice from our chilly temperatures in the outside environments, with lots of intrigue, language and wonder being expressed. We have created some lovely wintery pictures using glues, glitters, paints and textured materials, we've explored frosty play doh using a variety of different tools to make changes to it, and formed some shapes with different cutters. We've shared some lovely winter stories and learnt a new Incy Wincy Spider song which sees him climbing up the trees when down came the snow and made poor Incy freeze!
We will be continuing with our Winter theme through next week too so there is still chance for us to get some snow which will encourage new words and spoken language about our natural world.
We look forward to seeing you all next week for another magical fun week!
Welcome back to Nursery. This week we have welcomed some new friends from the Cygnets room. The Swans children have been sharing their toys beautifully and showing our new friends around. We have had some icy fun both indoors and outdoors. In our tuff tray we have made ice skating people and talked about the texture of the ice and what happens when it melts. We have been talking about shapes and using them to make snowman and snowladies. The children have been exploring making igloos using Duplo blocks to print bricks. We have also been moving like animals around the room.
On Thursday our Yr6 friends came to ask some questions about our favourite outdoor play equipment and they stayed for a little while to play with us and our toys. We are looking forward to seeing them again soon.
This week at Pre-School we have been very busy enjoying the snowy and icy weather, which created lots of excitement and wonderful opportunities for learning and discussion. The children were fascinated by how the world looked different covered in snow and ice, and we talked about how the cold weather made us feel and what changes we noticed around us.
Alongside our wintery explorations, we extended our learning from the story Neon Leon, which the children have been thoroughly enjoying. Our special words this week were Sad/Jungle/Match/Smile. We went on a fun scavenger hunt to find hidden chameleons, encouraging careful observation, teamwork and problem-solving skills. The children also took part in a matching game, searching for their matching colour chameleons and talking about colours they could see around them. To explore colour changes further, we used transparent colour sheets and special coloured magnifying glasses, allowing the children to see how the world can change colour and how this made them feel. We completed an art activity where the children had to match the colour paint to the chameleon and then camouflage Leon using bubble painting. We also began our phonics learning this week, focusing on environmental sounds. This linked perfectly with Neon Leon as the children enjoyed animal sound games and carefully cut out jungle animals, developing both their listening skills and fine motor control. It has been a joyful, creative and very colourful week of learning, despite the chilly weather!
This week at Nursery
19th December 2025
We are extremely proud of all the children at our nursery and the fantastic progress they have made this term. It has been wonderful to see their confidence grow, friendships flourish, and new skills develop, especially over the last couple of weeks which have been filled with festive fun, bringing us all together to celebrate what makes our nursery so special. This is all thanks to the hard work, dedication, and care of my incredible nursery team, who consistently provide a wide range of engaging experiences and opportunities for every child. As we look ahead to the new year, we will be supporting some children as they move rooms and wishing them every continued success, while also warmly welcoming our new starters into our nursery family. Finally, I would like to wish our entire nursery community a wonderful Christmas break spent with family and loved ones. We look forward to welcoming everyone back on Monday 5th January 2026.
What a fabulous end to the term we've had in the Chicks room. We began the week in the most festive way with our Christmas party! It was so wonderful to welcome parents and grandparents to share the fun with the children, enjoying sensory play, mark making, soft play and not to forget the biscuit decorating and eating of course! A huge thank you to everyone that was able to attend this event.
On Tuesday the children did some cork painting to create their own string of Christmas lights, exploring lots of different colours. We created a sensory tray, using weetabix and rice crispies to make a Christmas pudding shape. The children used their hands to scoop and pour the materials, sharing their experiences with both the adults and their peers. We were also very lucky that Mr Martin came to visit us with his snow machine on Thursday! The children enjoyed watching the 'snow' fall down on them and reaching out to try and touch it, it was very funny standing right in front of the machine too - it was a bit breezy! Throughout the week the children have all been exploring our wrapping paper tray too, discovering the different sounds that can be made when scrunching and ripping the paper. We have all had such a wonderful term and we are so proud of the progress all the children have made, we hope everyone has a fun and restful Christmas break ready for more fun in the new year!
This week in Cygnets we have continued with Christmas crafts spreading the glitter everywhere! We have enjoyed Christmas songs, stories, shared discussions on what we'd like Santa to bring us and explored our outside world with free play in the garden.
For the month of December, our little people have been very busy making lots of lovely bits to bring home and share with you so we've added a gallery of photos for you to now see.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our Cygnets and their families a very, merry and enjoyable Christmas and a magical new year together. We would also like to say farewell to our leavers and our lovely Jess who will be moving to the Swans room in January... we will miss them all! We look forward to welcoming all our remaining Cygnets back with us in 2026 and look forward to our new friends from Chicks who will also be joining us.
In Swans this week the children have been very busy and engaged in a range of meaningful experiences that supported their learning and development. They took great pride in helping to rearrange our home corner, working together to move resources and make the space more inviting and cosy. Through this, the children developed their independence, sense of responsibility, and early problem-solving skills, as well as communication and teamwork as they shared ideas and negotiated roles.
The children also enjoyed preparing to feed reindeer with yummy oats, carefully using spoons to scoop and pour. This activity supported the development of fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and early self-help skills, while also encouraging concentration and perseverance.
On Thursday, we were very lucky to avoid the heavy downpours when we walked together to the postbox to post our letters to Santa. We were lucky that the postman was there to help us out and this outing helped the children build confidence in the wider environment, practice listening and attention skills, and develop their understanding of road safety and routines within the community.
We are looking forward to welcoming some new friends to the Swans room in January. The children have been talking about new friends and familiar faces, including Jess, who will be moving up with them from Cygnets which we are all very excited about. We wish all of our Swans and their families a very happy Christmas and we look forward to seeing you in the New Year!
As we come to the end of another wonderful term in Pre-School, we would like to take a moment to celebrate just how incredible the children have been and how proud we are of everything they have achieved. This week was made even more special with a very exciting visit from Lindsay Pollock and her husband Neil, who shared their own beautifully written book in aid of Medical Detection Dogs. Lindsay captivated the children with the story of Iggy the Incredible, and there was great excitement when Bobbin, a real-life superhero medical detection dog, joined us in the classroom, sitting so calmly and listening alongside the children – a truly magical experience for everyone. We are very grateful for the kind donation of the book, which the children will continue to enjoy in Pre-School.
We were also immensely proud of the children during our Nativity performance, where they confidently showcased their growing performance skills in the hall, demonstrating just how much their confidence has blossomed over the term. Thank you to all our parents and carers for attending, for joining in with the festive celebrations, and for taking part in the Christmas craft activities with your children. We hope you enjoyed taking home all the special treasures the children have lovingly created for you, including their beautifully finished Diya lamps. Finally, we would like to wish all our families a peaceful and joyful Christmas, and in the words of the children themselves, who sang their hearts out with such enthusiasm… Feliz Navidad!
This week at Nursery
12th December 2025
What a wonderfully festive week it has been across all our rooms! From creative Christmas crafts and sensory play to outdoor adventures, dancing, storytelling, and special seasonal visitors, the children have been fully immersed in the magic of this time of year. Whether designing stockings in Chicks, welcoming Santa in Cygnets, crafting cards in Swans, or exploring the enchanting world of The Nutcracker and welcoming a ballerina to Pre-School, every group has enjoyed a joyful week filled with learning, laughter, and Christmas cheer. With parties, stay-and-play sessions, and lots of sparkle still to come, we are excited to continue celebrating this special season together.
We have had another festive week in the Chicks room. Throughout the week the children have been engaged in a variety of Christmas themed activities whilst developing a range of different skills. On Monday, we designed some colourful Christmas stockings. We used our fine motor skills, developing palmar grasps whilst using the paint sticks to make lots of marks. On Tuesday, everyone worked together to make some 'Christmas soup'. We filled a tuff tray with water with some baby carrots and Brussels sprouts too, adding in some bowls and spoons too for scooping.
The children have had lots of fun doing some sticking to decorate some Christmas trees. They used gems and pom-poms, developing fine motor skills as they used thumbs and forefingers to pick up the small objects.
We have spent lots of time outside this week, splashing in puddles, playing lots of peekaboo and making marks with chalk. We went for a walk around the school site and stopped to explore some of the equipment. Everyone had so much fun spinning wheels and swinging around.
We are looking forward to our Chicks Christmas Party on Monday from 9-10, we hope to see lots of you there!
What a busy, busy week we’ve had in Cygnets this week, our children have been very creative getting involved with some lovely Christmas crafts, dancing to festive music and getting into all the spirit of Christmas! We have some wonderful photos of the children creating some lovely Christmas items that will be coming home with you all next week, so we will share these pictures with you all next week. Tuesday afternoon, we invited our parents in for our festive stay and play session which was greatly attended, we had a wonderful time decorating gingerbread biscuits, decorating a Christmas tree, festive glitter play doh to explore, Christmas stories and a festive tablecloth to colour and mark make with. A little sing song with our Christmas favourite songs ended the wonderful day.
Santa came to visit us Thursday and we had a great time sending him some Christmas cheer and waving with excitement as he waved back at us! Our Cygnets were all very well behaved on our walk to his float and they are all very excited for the big day to arrive!
We look forward to more glitter, festive cheer and sing alongs next week too.
We have had a very busy and exciting week in Swans this week. The children have been making Christmas cards for their special people. They have also been finger painting a very beautiful gift to take home too.
We had a fantastic morning on Thursday during our Stay and Play Christmas Party. We were so excited to see the children from the Swans room and their parents/carers who joined with us to make melted snowmen biscuits, crafts and sing our Christmas songs together. We would like to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who came, we hope you all had as much fun as we did. It was lovely to be able chat to everyone. We look forward to more Stay and Play sessions in the New Year. On Friday we explored the school looking for Christmas trees, we found 14! The children counted them all with the help of the adults. We talked about our own trees and if they looked the same.
This week in Pre-School the children have been immersed in the story, music, and magic of The Nutcracker through expressive arts, literacy, and understanding of the world, fostering curiosity, creativity, and communication. The text vocabulary covered this week was scents, decorating, journey, magical and waltz. At the start of the week the children wrote letters to Santa, carefully working on their mark making skills. We then talked about how we post letters and the children wrote their envelopes which, of course, we took to the post-box and posted to the North Pole – we are excited to see if he reads them carefully! On Thursday we were treated to two very special visitors. Linking to the ballet portrayal of the Nutcracker, Izzy, Jane’s daughter, who is a ballerina, came and danced for us in her tutu. It was a truly magical moment and brought the ballet to life in our Pre-School room, we are so very grateful that Izzy came to visit us and that Jane has such a talented daughter.
We also visited Santa on his float, it was amazing to see him! We are looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday for our Pre-School Christmas Stay and Play session which will include our Nativity singing.
This week at Nursery
5th December 2025
What a magical start to the festive season we’ve had in nursery this week! Across all rooms, the children were welcomed into beautifully transformed spaces, filled with twinkling decorations and opportunities for rich, hands-on learning. From exploring paint, glitter, and festive sensory trays to creating special Christmas crafts and decorations, the children have been developing their fine-motor skills, creativity, and language as they chatted about colours, textures, and all things Christmassy. They have enjoyed working closely with adults and friends, collaborating in play, spotting signs of winter outdoors, and even becoming little nature detectives as they investigated pine branches and pinecones.
Whether splashing in puddles, singing Christmas songs, watching the Reception nativity, or discovering surprises hidden in the rice tuff trays, the children have shown curiosity, enthusiasm, and wonderful teamwork. It has truly been a joyful, festive-filled week in nursery, and we look forward to even more Christmas excitement next week!
This week in the Chicks room we have begun our Christmas topic. The little elves got very busy over the weekend and managed to decorate the whole room, it was wonderful for the children to be welcomed back for the new week to such a magical space. We have been very busy this week making some very special crafts to share with you a little closer to Christmas. The children have enjoyed working closely with the adults, exploring the feel of paint on their hands and feet, whilst talking about all the different colours too. The children have also had a go at making their own paper plate wreaths this week, using a scrubbing brush dipped in paint to make marks.
On Friday we filled a tuff tray with some red, green and white rice to explore. The children spent time investigating the different Christmas themed pictures hidden amongst the rice and we talked about the different things we could see. We have also been working on our coordination as the children practiced using spoons to scoop and move the rice.
We have continued to spend lots of time in our outdoor spaces throughout the week, the rainy weather on Thursday was great fun for splashing in the puddles. It has been lovely to see all the children interacting with each other, working together to put people in their houses, making music and doing lots of games of peekaboo! We're looking forward to having lots more festive fun next week.
This week in the Cygnets room, Christmas has officially arrived! The children loved decorating our festive tree and getting creative with painting, exploring the textures on their hands and adding plenty of sparkle with glitter. We have been singing Christmas songs, moulding and shaping glitter playdough, and pouring and scooping red and green glitter rice in the tuff spot—great for developing fine-motor skills, sensory exploration, and early maths concepts. The dinosaurs even joined in as the children made them stomp footprints through the playdough, encouraging imaginative play and early mark-making.
On Friday, we ventured into the natural area, where the children enjoyed spotting signs of winter, supporting their observation skills and understanding of the world. It has been a wonderfully festive, sensory-rich week!
In the Swans we are getting very excited talking about Christmas. The children have been building some amazing Christmas trees using Sticklebricks developing their positional language and chatting about their own Christmas trees in their homes. They have also made snowmen using shapes and cotton wool. There has been lots of chatting about what the children would like Santa to bring them whilst making their own wish list.
The children and adults worked together to decorate our Christmas tree beautifully too, we were very proud of what we created, it looks absolutely wonderful. The children have also been practicing their fine motor skills by using tweezers to place Pom Poms on our Christmas light string. We enjoyed singing lots of Christmas themed songs this week and we are looking forward to another week of festive fun next week.
This week in Pre-School we have been sharing the lovely story 'Pick a Pine Tree' by Patricia Toht, using it as a springboard for festive learning and exploration. Our focus vocabulary—spiky, trunk, upright, pointy, and ornaments—helped the children describe what they noticed as we talked about Christmas traditions and celebrated all the ways we can be creative. Together, we made beautiful decorations for our class tree and enjoyed rich sensory experiences, feeling the scent and texture of real pine branches and becoming nature detectives as we examined pinecones with magnifying glasses.
We also discussed winter weather and the kinds of decorations we see at this time of year, putting our fantastic fine motor skills to work as we designed and cut our own snowflakes. The children also enjoyed watching the wonderful Reception nativity performance, what a fabulous audience they were, sitting and listening beautifully, showing their appreciation and joining in with a Christmas song at the end, we were very proud of them. What a super start to the festive season—it has been a joyful week of curiosity, collaboration, and celebration!
This week at Nursery
28th November 2025
As we come to the end of another busy and joyful week at nursery, we’d like to remind families that we will be closed on Monday 1st December for our second INSET day.
It has been a wonderful week filled with winter exploration in the Chicks room, nursery-rhyme fun with the Cygnets, traditional games with the Swans, and festive storytelling in Pre-School. We hope everyone enjoys the long weekend, and we look forward to welcoming all of our children back on Tuesday 2nd December, ready for even more learning, creativity, and seasonal excitement together.
This week in the Chicks room, we have been learning all about winter. We have set up an igloo den with pretty twinkling lights which the children have all loved spending time inside, looking at the lights with wonder. Inside our igloo were some 'snowballs' too, made from socks! The children have shown excellent skills to throw the snowballs around the room, with particular enjoyment when they managed to aim at the adults! On Monday we created some melted snowmen with puffy paint, the children enjoyed feeling the texture of the paint and stuck on some eyes, a carrot nose and buttons to complete their picture. We have been very lucky this week, as the snow arrived in our tuff tray! Mixing together some flour and oil and leaving it to chill in the fridge, we were able to create some 'snow' for the children to explore. There was lots of sprinkling, squashing, crumbling and swiping going on - a fantastic way of building up the children's strength and developing their fine motor skills. We have been designing our own igloos too, using some Duplo dipped in white paint, the children stamped onto an igloo shape to create the effect of ice bricks.
To finish off our week, we filled a tuff tray with lots of ice cubes. The children were very keen to investigate these, although they were very cold! The children experimented with using spoons to scoop the ice cubes into bowls and we were so impressed with their perseverance as they were incredibly slippery.
This week in Cygnets we have been focussing our activities on our favourite nursery rhymes or songs, Monday we had Wind the Bobbin Up with creating marks with cotton reels and paints and threading laces through cotton reels to enhance fine motor skills and creativity.
Tuesday, we had A Big Red Bus with a tray filled with transport vehicles, arts and crafts with a selection of foam shape vehicles to decorate along with vehicle and transport puzzles, these all tied in lovely with communication skills encouraging conversations. Wednesday was a day based upon 5 Little Speckled Frogs with a play tray filled with visual pictures of the life cycle of a frog, finger painting creating speckled frog pictures and physical movement with jumping like frogs. Thursday, we focussed on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with star shapes and glitter to create our own sparkling stars, star jumping to music and a sparkly tinkering tray. Our Cygnets have sung their hearts out to their favourite songs and produced some great actions too! Other activities enjoyed this week have included imaginative play in the popular home corner, trains and track, play doh, group stories, building with lego bricks, investigating with our exploring toys, threading sets and constructing with our tools and work bench.
Have a lovely long weekend, we look forward to seeing our Cygnets again next week for the start of our Christmas activities.
This week the Swans have been taking part in a variety of traditional games, and we are so proud of how much our children are growing in confidence and ability. During Hopscotch, the children have been practising hopping, jumping, balancing, and landing safely. Many of them are now showing greater control of their movements and celebrating their own achievements with big smiles! We have also been recognising shapes and numbers up to 5, with the children becoming more confident in pointing them out and naming them during play. Their early problem-solving skills have shone through as they completed lots of puzzles, showing improved concentration, persistence, and fine-motor control.
Taking turns has been a big focus too. The children had great fun playing a large Snakes & Ladders game, learning to wait patiently, celebrate their friends’ successes, and follow simple rules. They also listened beautifully during a game of Bingo with an adult, showing wonderful early listening, attention, and understanding. We are incredibly proud of the progress the Swans have made this week—each child is developing new skills, growing in independence, and showing joy in their learning every day.
This week in Pre-School, we explored ‘The Nativity’ by Gemma Barder, journeying alongside Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem and learning about the important roles of the angel, the little donkey, and the star that shone over the stable. Our focus vocabulary included carpenter, angel, wise, stable, and shepherds, which the children enjoyed using during story time and play.
We created beautiful gold paper-plate angels, crafted a clothespin donkey who bravely trod an obstacle course to re-enact the journey, and made shimmering stars to represent the Star of Bethlehem. As the week drew to a close, we reflected on the final part of the story with the Shepherds and Wise Men—thinking together about why they brought gifts and what we can give that shows kindness. The children are carefully storing their Christmas crafts to share with their families as special gifts in the last week of term. We are also busy practising our songs for the Nativity performance at the Christmas Stay and Play, and a letter with further details will be sent soon. It has been wonderful to hear that the children are practising their songs at home too—what lovely previews you’re getting! What a joyful week of stories, role play, creativity, and music.
This week at Nursery
21st November 2025
It’s been another exciting week full of learning, creativity, and outdoor fun! Despite the chilly weather, our children have been fully engaged in hands-on activities that support their development and spark curiosity. Across the nursery, children explored road safety in playful and practical ways and maths and creative learning were also a big focus this week. Children went on shape hunts, painted and printed shapes, solved puzzles, and explored repeating patterns. Outdoor play was just as busy, with puddle splashing, chalk drawing and rides on bikes, trikes, and scooters. The children wrapped up warm and embraced every opportunity to explore, learn, and have fun together. This week has been full of laughter, discovery, and important learning moments. Every child has been at the centre of their play, developing key skills such as problem-solving, creativity, communication, and social interaction. We look forward to another week of fun, learning, and new adventures!
This week in the Chicks room our topic has been Road Safety Week. The children have enjoyed engaging with a variety of activities focussed around vehicles and roads to support this. We started off the week by investigation some roads made from bubble wrap. The children enjoyed pushing their vehicles along the bubble wrap to make it pop, as well as using their hands and feet.
The children have also created their own traffic light pictures by using corks dipped in red, yellow and green paint to make marks. We were really impressed with the children’s precision and concentration during this activity. Our road sensory tray proved to be a big hit this week, everyone showed lots of curiosity as they explored all the different textures and investigated how the vehicles moved across the different materials. To make our mark making even more fun this week, we taped some pens to the back of some toy cars. When pushed the vehicles left trails behind on the paper however, the children interpreted this activity in their own way and put their problem solving skills to good use as they tried to remove the pens from the vehicles to be able to make marks in a different way! On Friday, we discovered what marks the wheels of our vehicles make when dipped in paint. The children spent time pushing their vehicles across the paper and making lots of colourful tracks.
It has been very cold throughout the whole week but, that hasn’t stopped the Chicks from having a great time in our outdoor spaces. Every day we have wrapped up warm in our puddle suits, coats, hats and gloves and spent time creating games of peekaboo with friends, making marks with chalk and demonstrating some fantastic kicking skills. We have been on walks to find puddles and enjoyed splashing in the biggest, muddiest puddles we could find!
We’ve had another fantastic week in Cygnets, focusing our activities to tie in with Maths week. Our Cygnets have been learning shapes, size, measure, space and numbers. We started our week with a shape hunt in the natural area, looking for hidden shapes under the leaves, on top of logs, behind swings, this was a great way of learning new words and showing an understanding with positional language.
Following on from this the children have been creating some lovely shape pictures using paints and sponges, matching shapes to shapes showing similarities and also orientation when making puzzle pieces fit into correct places on inset boards. Other activities enjoyed this week include transport play with vehicles and aircraft, role play with dolls and tea sets, play doh with tools and cutters, sticking and gluing, outdoor play with bikes, trikes and scooters and learning new songs in group times. We look forward to another busy week next week.
In Swans this week, we have been learning about road safety through a range of engaging, hands-on activities that support children’s development across multiple skill areas. During our traffic light activity, the children practiced listening and attention skills as they ran on green and stopped quickly on red, also developing their physical coordination, balance, and gross motor skills. While crossing the road on our painted zebra crossing, with guidance from some young lollipop men and women and playful interactions with “drivers” honking their horns, children enhanced their understanding of road safety rules and built social skills such as taking turns, cooperating, and following instructions.
In our tuff tray activity, children explored cause-and-effect and creative expression by driving vehicles through paint, observing the marks they made, and discussing their observations, which promoted fine motor control and language development. Additionally, by making their own traffic lights, children practiced their creativity, colour recognition, and sequencing skills, while also learning to communicate their understanding of traffic signals and safety concepts. Lots of fun was had by everyone!
This week in Pre-School we loved exploring “The Perfect Fit” by Naomi and James Jones, a heart-warming story about a little triangle who discovers that everyone is unique and has their own special place in the world. Our focus vocabulary for this week was brilliant, corner, decide, love, sort, and pattern, carefully chosen from the Oxford Vocabulary Framework to unlock learning and ensure the children are building a rich vocabulary. This helped us talk about the shapes we see every day and how we can sort them in different ways. The children enjoyed going on a shape hunt around the room and outside, and we wondered whether they might spot any interesting shapes at home too! We used paint to make repeating patterns with shape printing and created our very own shape snowmen indoors, all the while hoping the real snow would settle so we could build one together outside.
On Thursday we marked Universal Children’s Day, reminding ourselves that all children have the right to be safe, to play, to learn, and to be loved. We explored where children live around the world and learned “Siyahamba” a joyful song with actions from Africa that inspired us to move to its amazing rhythm. We also made a colourful chain of friendship to display proudly in our classroom. It has been a wonderful week filled with learning about shapes, celebrating friendship, and discovering how we all fit together — with plenty of singing and lots of practice for our Christmas songs!
This week at Nursery
14th November 2025
What a wonderful week we’ve had across the nursery, filled with creativity, kindness, and meaningful learning experiences. From marking Remembrance Day with thoughtful crafts and activities to celebrating Children in Need with engaging sensory play, each room has been buzzing with curiosity and joy. Our children have embraced themes of friendship and kindness through stories, imaginative play, and collaborative activities, and despite the very wet November weather, they’ve relished every moment of outdoor exploration. It has been a delight to see them grow in confidence, build connections with one another, and immerse themselves in rich, play-based learning throughout the week.
This week in the Chicks’ room we have been focussing our activities around Remembrance Day and Children In Need. On Monday we created some lovely poppy pictures, using some red paint sticks to make marks before sticking on a black circle centre. We also created a sensory tray using red rice in the shape of a poppy for the children to explore. The children showed great skill to use spoons to scoop the rice and have been developing their coordination to pour the rice into smaller pots too. With Children in Need on Friday, we made some yellow gloop with cornflour and water for the children to investigate. This activity provided lots of curiosity and fascination as the children discovered the different textures and enjoyed watching the gloop dripping from their hands.
Despite the very wet weather throughout the week, our puddlesuits and wellies have been getting plenty of use as the Chicks have had the BEST time exploring outside in the rain. We have been on a walk around the school hunting for puddles to splash in, the children all have a very good eye for spotting them! On Friday, we went out into the garden during the rain which was so much fun. The children have done lots of stamping in puddles and even discovered that the deep puddles were perfect for scooping with spoons.
As we have been celebrating Kindness Week, this week in Cygnets we have very much been focussing our theme on kindness and building friendships. We have discussed our rules of the room and reiterated this each day as a reminder during group times. Our Cygnets have shown good listening skills and have shared in discussions about using our kind hands, kind words and listening ears when sharing experiences with others. Our activities this week have included soft play in the main school hall to encourage working together to build towers, join in rough and tumble play and engage in parallel and shared play, we’ve created lots of lovely masterpieces with free painting, allowing the children to make choices with the tools they use and the colours they like, we have explored sensory trays filled with pasta for texture, objects for colour sorting and bowls and scoops for filling and emptying.
We have had lots of imaginative play based around our home corner making cakes for others, dressing the dolls and inviting others in to our play. Play doh has again been very popular with the use of a variety of tools to make changes to materials, with lots of rolling and cutting being displayed. Group song times have been lovely with the children vocalising their favourite songs and building confidence to sing to others independently. We have had a lovely week watching and observing our children develop their friendships and confidence around others.
This week in the Swans room we have been focusing on friendship and kindness. The children used their fine motor skills to carefully hold a brush and paint paper plate poppies and we also joined the bigger children for a school Remembrance assembly. We were so proud of how well the children behaved, listening respectfully and standing still! The children have enjoyed listening to stories about kindness and talking about the characters and their actions afterwards. They have also made friendship bracelets by carefully threading different coloured pasta onto string, showing lots of patience and perseverance.
We have been so happy to see many acts of kindness displayed by the Swans this week, from holding a friend’s hand to support them to sharing resources together, we have celebrated these lovely moments. On Friday we celebrated Children in Need by colouring pictures of Pudsey and decorating eye patches. Another super week for us all.
This week in Pre-School, we have been exploring the theme of friendship through the heart-warming story "Misha Makes Friends" by Tom Percival. Our focus vocabulary included kindness, friendship, shy, peace, and teamwork and the children really embraced these ideas in their play and learning. We created our own “junk modelling friends,” showing amazing creativity and imagination, and enjoyed plenty of role-play opportunities to practise being kind and inclusive. The children made us all so proud during our school outdoors Remembrance Assembly, where they showed such wonderful respect and thoughtfulness. They also made beautiful suncatcher poppies which now brighten our classroom windows. During the week, we designed and shared pasta friendship bracelets, taking turns and thinking carefully about who we might gift them to. We also celebrated World Kindness Day, recognising the power of small acts of kindness and creating lovely wooden hearts to give to someone special. To finish the week, we joined in with Children in Need, learning about how our kindness can extend into the wider community.
We were also delighted to welcome back Mrs Tebboth, our arts specialist teacher, who showed us how to glaze our clay diya lamps with lovely colours — the next exciting step will be for the lamps to go into the kiln. Can your child remember this new word? They learned it beautifully in class! As always, all of this wonderful learning took place through rich, play-based experiences — full of music, singing, play dough, counting songs, creative crafts, and captivating stories. What another wonderful week of learning, laughter, and friendship in Pre-School!
This week at Nursery
7th November 2025
Welcome back everyone! We hope you all had a wonderful and restful half term break. It has been such a joy to see the children return to nursery so beautifully this week — full of smiles, enthusiasm, and ready to learn.
With Bonfire Night celebrated this week, our theme across the nursery has been centred on fireworks and safety, helping the children to understand how to enjoy the celebrations safely while exploring the colours, sounds, and excitement of this special time of year. From creative firework art and sensory play to learning about festivals of light, the nursery has been filled with sparkle, laughter, and curiosity as we begin this exciting new half term together.
We are delighted to share the Christmas Stay and Play dates with you for this half term.
CHICKS – Monday 15th December 9:00 – 10:00
CYGNETS - Tuesday 9th December 2:15 – 3:15
SWANS – Thursday 11th December 9:00 – 11:00
PRE-SCHOOL – Wednesday 17th December – 1:30 – 3:15
We've had a lovely start to the new half term in the Chicks room and we were so impressed with how everyone has settled straight back into routines. This week we have been focussing on the topic of Bonfire Night, with the room being filled with lots of noise and colour. We have created some bonfire pictures using paint, it was fun to explore the feel of the paint on our fingers. We have also been experimenting with different kinds of media to make some firework pictures, using chalks to make marks with and also dipping some cardboard tubes into paint to create some colourful fireworks. On Wednesday the children made some edible sparklers using breadsticks, melted chocolate and sprinkles. All of the children showed great attention to listen to instructions and follow demonstrations and we were equally surprised that everyone resisted the urge to eat the sparklers, we hope they were very tasty at home though!
On Friday the children engaged in some sensory play with glitter, using small brushes to make marks like fireworks. The children enjoyed looking at the different firework pictures on display as they moved the sparkly glitter around with their brushes and hands. Throughout the week we have been making good use of our pots and pans too, hitting them with wooden spoons to make lots of loud bangs - just like fireworks!
What a wonderful week we have had in Cygnets this week, it’s been lovely to welcome everyone back from their half term breaks and hope you all had a very enjoyable week.
This week we have focussed our week on ‘Festivals of colour’ we started our week learning about different cultures and traditions paying attention to the recent celebrations of Diwali. Our cygnets created some lovely pictures using an array of different coloured paints and we created a tuff tray filled with lots of coloured beans, stars, Diwali visual cards and torches for lights, the children loved exploring the items in the tray and it encouraged lots of great colour recognition and conversations about fireworks.
We continued our week with lots of creative activities to celebrates Guy Fawkes night, creating firework pictures using straws, splatter painting and adding glitter for sparkle! We focused our communication around the sounds that fireworks make.. crackle, pop, bang being some of the key words. Our Cygnets also enjoyed making their own edible sparklers using breadsticks, chocolate and sprinkles… this was a very popular activity and they were very keen to take them home to enjoy!
A trip to the natural area was also enjoyed during the week with lots of exploration, imagination, gross motor skills and turn taking skills all being displayed by our children.
Next week we will be focussing our theme on ‘kindness week’ this will help our children to develop skills such as friendship building, following instructions, understanding feelings and emotions and showing empathy for others.
Please feel free to dress your child in something yellow or spotty on Friday as we will be celebrating children in need day.
We look forward to seeing you all next week.
This week the Swans have been learning all about fireworks! We talked about how to stay safe when watching fireworks or visiting a bonfire night event, and the children created their very own paint fireworks and even made some yummy breadstick sparklers. We also enjoyed a lovely visit to the school library, where everyone had fun reading and sharing books together.
Today, we went on an autumn walk around the school grounds to spot the seasonal changes, and the children had a huge amount of fun using pipettes in some sparkly gold water – a great activity for developing fine motor skills. There was lots of laughter, and poor Mrs Aris ended up getting a little soggy in the process!
his week at Pre-School has been full of exciting learning and exploration as we discovered the themes of friendship, sharing, and autumn changes through the delightful story Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper. The children really enjoyed talking about the characters’ friendship and how they worked together, linking beautifully to our focus vocabulary for the week: stir, pour, share, sparkle, and bang.
We had great fun exploring real pumpkins through sensory and creative play — feeling their different textures, comparing their sizes and weights, and discovering their unique smells. The children showed fantastic fine motor skills as they created beautiful pumpkin prints using sponge painting. Later in the week, we learned all about Bonfire Night and talked about fire safety, listening carefully and sharing our ideas about how to stay safe around fireworks. We made our own musical shakers and joined in with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra’s exciting firework-themed music, shaking and moving in time to the bangs and sparkles! The children also created wonderful firework art prints using bright, dazzling paints. To finish our week, we worked together to make real pumpkin soup, taking turns to cut, stir, pour, and add ingredients before tasting our delicious creation and describing the flavours. It was a fantastic way to end a fun, hands-on week of learning.
Date for your diary: Our Pre-School Christmas Nativity and Parent Craft Afternoon will be held on Wednesday 17th December at 1.30pm — further details to follow nearer the time, we can’t wait to see you there!
This week at Nursery
24th October 2025
We’ve had a wonderful half term here at Buckingham Primary Nursery. It has absolutely flown by and has been filled with happy children, lots of success, and friendships blossoming all around! The children have enjoyed plenty of exciting learning indoors as well as fun adventures exploring our beautiful school grounds, discovering all the colours and wonders of autumn.
We welcomed parents for two more Stay and Play sessions; this week it was the Cygnets and Chicks' turn to welcome their families to nursery. These are proving to be very successful and worthwhile and our aim is to make this happen once per half term.
As we reach the end of this busy and joyful half term, we’d like to wish everyone a peaceful and happy break. For those children joining us for half term holiday care, we’re looking forward to a fantastic week ahead—filled with laughter, creativity, and lots of spooky seasonal fun!
This week in the Chicks room we have been learning all about Autumn. During the week the children have been busy exploring our autumn tuff tray, looking at lots of different leaves, pine cones and sticks. On Monday we celebrated Diwali and created our own paper plate diva lamps with different coloured paints. The children have also been working on their palmar grasps by using crayons to make marks on different autumn themed shapes. We have experimented with using some pine cones dipped in paint to make marks with too, the children were all fascinated to explore the texture of the pine cones once they were covered in paint. We created a sensory tray full of coloured rice with some autumnal pictures for the children to investigate. Everyone enjoyed using their hands to move the rice in different ways as they swiped, scooped and poured. We finished off the week doing some sticking to create some lovely leaf sun catchers.
This week we have also been doing a variety of activities to help develop our gross motor skills. Despite the rainy weather on Monday, we enjoyed going for a walk around the school and hunting for puddles - the children were great at finding puddles of all shapes and sizes and they were great fun to splash in too! We have also been using our indoor climbing frame, we were very impressed with the children's balance and bravery to climb so high!
This week in Cygnets we have been learning all about mini beasts, their features and their habitats. The children have loved exploring with mini beasts and identifying the different creatures. We have had some lovely art activities creating spiders using our handprints, making wriggly worm pictures with wool dipped in paint, adding our fingerprints as spots on ladybirds and much more.
Our tuff tray filled with lots of different creatures generated a lot of interest and exploration and to this we added green rice, green lentils, mixed herbs and blocks for the creatures to hide under. The children were able to explore using their senses describing what they could see, smell and touch. We’ve also enjoyed some lovely group time activities, sharing stories on mini beasts, singing our favourite songs, following instructions with parachute games and watching Superworm on our interactive board. This week we also welcomed our parents in for a stay and play session to see their children in action… we had a lovely morning and it was well attended. Our children were all pleased to see their parents joining in with the fun!
We wish our Cygnets a lovely relaxed half term next week and for those attending nursery we have a spooktacular week with tricks and treats coming up!
The Swans have been talking about Diwali this week. We had lots of fun using chalk to make Rangoli patterns, they look wonderful. We enjoyed using our fine motor skills to brush away a mixture of rice and lentils to discover Diwali pictures underneath.
The children also made their own Diwali lamps out of salt dough. We welcomed the children and their families to a Spooky Stay and Play on Thursday. We had lots of fun making handprint spiders, paper plate ghosts and yummy spider or pumpkin cupcakes. We would like to thank everyone who came and look forward to doing more in the future.
This week in preschool, we have had a wonderful time exploring cultural celebrations through story, sensory play, and creative activities. On Monday, we celebrated Black History through the book ‘Every Little Thing’ inspired by Bob Marley’s uplifting song ‘Three Little Birds’. The children loved learning to sing the line “Don’t worry about a thing, ’cause every little thing is gonna be alright” with accompanying actions. We talked about how music can make us feel happy and calm, and we had so much fun keeping the beat together in our performing arts room. Later in the week, we celebrated Diwali, the Festival of Lights, through the beautiful story ‘Binny’s Diwali’ by Thrity Umrigar. Our focus vocabulary included the words celebration/sari/peace/hero/equal, which helped us reflect on the themes of unity and kindness that connect all people. The children created colourful firework art and intricate Rangoli patterns, learning that Diwali is a time for joy, light, and togetherness.
Our art specialist, Mrs. Tebboth, joined us for a very special session where she taught us how to model with clay and make our own Diya lamps. The children were fantastic—following instructions carefully, experimenting with tools, and adding unique designs and textures to their creations. After half term, we’re excited to add vibrant glazes to our Diya lamps before taking them home. What an incredible week of learning, creativity, and celebration!
This week at Nursery
17th October 2025
It’s been another amazing week at Buckingham Primary Nursery! We ended the week with the Chicks Room Stay and Play, and it was lovely to see so many parents joining in with our fun autumn activities. Thank you all so much for coming.
Next week, we’re looking forward to welcoming families to the Cygnets and Swans Stay and Play sessions too. As the weather turns colder, please make sure your child comes to nursery with appropriate shoes, a warm coat, and other seasonal clothing. Don’t forget to check the Parents Tab on our website — there’s a Seasonal Safety section with helpful reminders about Be Bright, Be Seen and Trick or Treat safety as Halloween approaches. Wishing you all a peaceful and cosy weekend.
This week in the Chicks room we have been learning all about our favourite foods. Throughout the week the children have enjoyed accessing the role play area, making use of the kitchen and putting their imagination to use as they mixed up a variety of foods to share with friends. We have been investigating lots of different foods and their textures too by creating some sensory bags full of bananas, peas and oranges. This activity was great for developing the children's fine motor skills as they moved the food around the bags and squashed it. The children had fun exploring our spaghetti tray this week. The children used forks to pick up the spaghetti and of course, there was lots of chance for some taste testing.
The most popular activity of the week seemed to be the water tray full of citrus fruits. During this activity everyone showed some fantastic fine motor skills and coordination to use spoons in a scooping motion to fill up their bowls. The children were fascinated by the feel of the fruits and spent time squashing them in their hands and testing their strength as they pulled them apart, there were lots of funny faces too as the children discovered the sourness of the lemons and limes they tried to eat!
We rounded off the week by welcoming parents to our wonderful Autumn Stay and Play session. The children had such a great time accessing a variety of autumn themed activities, we are so grateful to everyone that was able to attend and we hope that everyone had a great time. We look forward to organising more, similar events in the future!
This week in Cygnets, we concluded our Autumn theme with activities focussed around Harvest. We have created some lovely pictures using fruits and vegetables to make prints with. We've also had some great colour matching and size ordering activities too. We worked on a large scale to create a lovely welly boot prints picture, walking along a large sheet of paper wearing wellies that we walked through paint in and then out onto paper to create the prints.
Other activities enjoyed have been flour play creating marks with Autumn shape cutters, play doh and tools, messy trays with food items such as lentils, pearl barley and pasta with lots of fruit and veg and mini scoops and bowls for emptying and filling.
We look forward to lots more fun next week with minibeasts being our theme
This week in Swans we have been hearing lots of language relating to size. The children have been carefully putting pictures of people into size order. We have had life sized outlines of the children dotted around our room, the children patiently let the adults draw around them and were amazed by the end products. In the tuff tray we had a variety of different sized drawn handprints which the children could place their hands on to and talk about if their hands were bigger or smaller.
We visited some new friends in yr6 and talked about the differences in the size of our hands, feet and height. Both age groups were so well behaved, we were very proud of them all. The yr6 children were so friendly, they invited us all to the library and read us some fantastic stories. We hope that they will be able to come to visit us in Nursery sometime soon.
In Pre-School this week, our learning has been inspired by the story ‘I Don’t Want to Be Small’ by Laura Ella Anderson which encouraged the children to think about their own growth and uniqueness. Our focus vocabulary from the story was tiptoes/unfair/stilts/shower/sigh and the children provided a super action for each word, I wonder if they can remember? Through the story, we explored the concept that everyone grows and learns at their own pace, helping the children develop a secure understanding of their own age and personal achievements. Our activities focused on comparing height and size, using mathematical language such as ‘taller’, ‘shorter’, ‘bigger’, and ‘smaller’ and recognising numbers in fun, meaningful ways. The children enjoyed hands-on exploration with playdough and sand to represent numbers, measure, and compare quantities, developing both fine motor and early maths skills.
In the performing arts room, we took part in lively music and movement sessions, promoting confidence, coordination, and self-expression. We also enjoyed some cosmic yoga developing our flexibility, strength, and balance. We have also been reinforcing our Pre-School rule — ‘Choose it, Use it, and Put it Away’ — which supports independence, responsibility, and care for our learning environment. We would greatly appreciate parents reinforcing this at home, as tidying up and caring for resources are important skills linked to the ‘Personal, Social and Emotional Development’ area of the EYFS, helping children build self-regulation, confidence, and respect for shared spaces. What a fabulous week!
This week at Nursery
10th October 2025
Today we wore yellow to show our support for Mental Health Awareness — such a happy, bright colour to remind us how grateful we are for our good health and wellbeing. We want to remind all our nursery families that we are always here for our wonderful nursery community if you ever need us. The children have been busy this week making the most of the fine autumn weather, enjoying time outdoors and watching the leaves change into beautiful autumn colours.
There has been so much talking, laughing, and sharing — “chatter matters,” and it’s been fantastic to hear such rich language developing through our stories, rhymes, and songs. Our amazing staff even make up their own songs to link into the children’s learning, helping them practise and remember new words in a fun and engaging way — what a wonderful week of learning and laughter!
This week in the Chicks room our topic has been ‘My Favourite Toys’. We have had a very busy week playing with lots of different toys in lots of different ways. Through the week the children have loved spending time in the ball pit, which looks to be great fun to dive into and everyone has really mastered the art of throwing the balls too! On Monday we created some ‘taste-safe’ sand using some crushed cereals, during this activity the children were able to explore the texture of the ‘sand’ in their hands and on their feet as well as providing a great opportunity to practice some coordination whilst using the spades to do lots of scooping and pouring. As the children have shown a keen interest in mark making over the past few weeks, we decided to make some coloured ice cubes to get creative with this week. We were very impressed with how closely the children watched the adults demonstrating moving the ice cubes across the paper before putting this new knowledge into action and having a go themselves. It was a little tricky to keep hold of the slippery ice but everyone showed such curiosity and determination to be able to make their own marks.
During the week, the children have also been rescuing some of their toys as some of our animals became trapped in jelly. There was a lot of fine motor skills being developed as the children attempted to grab hold of the animals and remove them from the jelly but it was great fun picking up handfuls of jelly to squish between fingers too. Unfortunately, some of the children’s favourite toys also ended up being wrapped up in tinfoil this week too! The children were fascinated by these shiny objects but were super curious to discover what was inside. This activity was a fantastic way to encourage the children to use their early problem-solving skills whilst developing fine motor skills as they worked to remove the foil from their toys. Hopefully all of our favourite toys will be safe for everyone to continue enjoying now thanks to everyone’s hard work!
This week in Cygnets we have continued to focus our activities on the theme Autumn. With this in mind, we have extended our knowledge on colour mixing, animals and hibernation, autumn shapes, leaf printing, Autumn songs, stories and much more!
Pumpkin spice play doh has been popular to explore with, we have created hedgehogs with it and added Autumn objects to it to enhance textures. Autumn objects have been available every day to help promote conversations, discuss family events and Autumn walks and we have accessed our natural area to search for Autumn objects. Vegetable and fruit printing has been our focus for creativity, using lots of Autumn colours to create colour matching, mirror imaging pictures. We have used leaves as real objects to develop our hand eye co-ordination skills with threading wools through the hole punched edges.
Next week we will be finishing our Autumn theme with our focus being on Harvest.
This week in Swans we have been talking about our names and ages. We have been focusing on the children being able to recognise the number of their age. We have been impressed witht he children being able to tell us how old they are and show us that many number of fingers or objects. In our tuff tray the children have been placing the correct amount of conkers, acorns & cones next to the number.
We have been exploring making marks and talking about the texture of shaving foam what fun! It was very messy but there was lots of giggling.
This week in preschool, the children have been exploring the special meaning behind their names through the beautiful story “My Name is a Gift”. Together, we discussed how each name is unique and carries a special significance, helping the children understand that names are gifts to be respected, celebrated, and pronounced correctly.
Building on this theme, the children have been engaging in a range of mark-making activities, tracing, decorating, and beginning to pre-write the letters in their own names. They showed growing confidence and pride as they recognised the first letters and expressed their creativity by adding colour and texture to their work. These experiences have not only strengthened their early literacy and fine motor skills but also deepened their appreciation for the diversity of names within our community. We’ve been delighted to see how this learning has encouraged the children to value both their own names and those of their friends, fostering inclusion and respect. To top off our week, we were once again blessed with plenty of sunshine, giving us the perfect opportunity to enjoy a variety of games and adventures in our outdoor space and garden — a wonderful way to balance our thoughtful indoor activities with energetic outdoor play. Please remember to empty your child’s tray each day as it may contain treasure within! This helps us to keep things tidy and ensures you don’t miss any of their amazing creations. Thank you for your support.
This week at Nursery
3rd October 2025
Another incredible week at Buckingham Primary Nursery. Autumn is definitely here, bringing with it the beautiful colours of the falling leaves. The children have loved exploring the outdoors on our autumn walks, noticing the changes around them. Pre-School enjoyed their Autumn celebration with parents on Thursday, thank you all for coming, we hope you enjoyed it. Keep an eye on Famly for more Stay and Play dates shared from your child’s room.
We have been so impressed with how well our children are working together, building friendships, and showing great teamwork. In our indoors and outdoors areas, the children have been remembering our helpful rule: “Choose it, Use it, Put it away” — helping to keep our environment tidy and organised. This is something you might like to try at home too! As the weather is becoming more unsettled, please ensure your child comes to nursery dressed appropriately in puddle suits, wellies, and coats so they can enjoy outdoor play in all conditions.
We have had another fantastic week in the Chicks room. This week our topic of focus has been ‘My Family and My Pets’. Thank you to everyone that has sent in family and pet photos, the children really do love being able to see the people they know and love within the room! We have been very busy being creative throughout the week, with several different crafts. Earlier in the week, the children experimented with some sticking to decorate their own family houses. This was a great opportunity to talk with the children and help them to recognise the special people in their lives as well as being a great way to work on fine motor skills whilst practicing picking up some small pieces. We have also been talking about pet animals too and making lots of different sounds. Everyone has experimented with using some of the small world animals dipped in paint to make marks on the paper and discover what different patterns they created as well as using the paint sticks to decorate some very colourful pet animals!
Our display board is certainly starting to look beautiful with lots of the children’s wonderful pictures. On Friday we created a sensory tray full of oats, with some very special people and pets hiding underneath. The children have been demonstrating great curiosity as they explored the texture of the oats and were thrilled to find their family pictures hiding underneath!
We have loved continuing to spend lots of time outside again throughout the week. Earlier in the week we took a wander around the school and found great joy in discovering lots of different sticks and leaves to pick up and look at as well as roaming around the big spaces and exploring some of the equipment too. In the garden, the small world houses and people have proved to be very popular. The children have been using their imagination to move the people around different areas of the houses, posting them through windows and doors too which was great fun!
This wee in Cygnets we have been fully embracing the Autumn season. The children have enjoyed listening to Autumn stories and singing Autumn songs. We spent time exploring our natural area, where the children collected a variety of natural materials such as leaves, twigs, conkers and acorns. The children worked creatively and made some leaf silhouette pictures, fingerprint tree paintings and practiced their gluing and sticking using objects we collected in the natural area.
The children explored our Autumn sensory basket, offering lots of hands on fun. The tuff tray was filled with lots of different autumnal items, encouraging curiosity and imaginative play. Throughout the week, we have talked about the colours of autumn and the changes we see outside, especially how the leaves turn red, yellow, orange and brown. We have had a great week of discovery and creativity.
In The Swans room this week the children have been learning and talking about Autumn. We have been making Autumn wreaths with different coloured leaves and woodland animals on.
They have had lots of fun exploring our Autumn tuff tray, talking about the textures of the leaves, acorns, conkers and conker shells. We have heard some fantastic descriptive words such as spiky, smooth, crunchy and shiny. The children have been finger painting Autumn pictures too.
What a busy and exciting week we’ve had in Pre-School! Our focus has been on Harvest and all the wonderful ways we can learn, create, and celebrate together. Through the traditional tale of ‘The Little Red Hen’, the children explored the idea that food begins with seeds. They planted their own seeds, discovered where different foods come from, and even used vegetables to make colourful paint prints. We also learned about how wheat is turned into flour, and the children had great fun making, baking, and tasting their very own bread. The story also led to wonderful discussions about friendship and the importance of helping others.
A special highlight of the week was the visit from the fire brigade, who came to fill our school swimming pool—then stayed to show us their fire engine, equipment, and even let the children climb into the back seats! To finish off the week, the children shone brightly in their harvest performance, singing the songs they had worked so hard to learn, before enjoying some wonderful harvest crafts alongside their parents and grandparents.
This week at Nursery
26th September 2025
What a fantastic and fun-filled week we have had here at Buckingham Primary Nursery! The children have been absolutely brilliant, with lots of laughs and learning shared among friends. We have been so proud to see their imaginations at work during play and exploring times. The children's bright smiles and energy have made our days so enjoyable. So much fun has been had this week, we certainly made the most of the sunshine and have loved exploring outdoors with our friends. We are so grateful for our vibrant nursery community, and seeing the children learn and grow together fills us with so much happiness. We look forward to another week of fun and discovery with your little ones.
What a busy week we’ve had in the Chicks room. We have continued with our ‘All About Me’ theme this week, talking about ourselves and learning what we like to do. The children have been having fun doing some sticking this week and created some wonderful paper plate faces. They carefully chose their coloured button ‘eyes’, before deciding where to place their wool ‘hair’ and a big smiley mouth to complete the look, these pictures have made a lovely addition to our display board! We have also been busy having a go at doing some mark making with pencils and crayons again. The children have been working really hard to develop their strength to hold the writing tools and moving their hands to be able to make their marks. On Friday, the children have been experimenting with using some yogurt mixed with food colouring to paint with. This activity was a great way to provide the children with the experience of painting, all whilst being completely taste-safe! Everyone loved making lots of mess as we painted the table, listening to the rustling tinfoil cover and of course, having a little taste!
The Chicks have had the best time exploring different areas around the school grounds throughout the week too. At the beginning of the week, we walked to the playground where the children were able to investigate some of the climbing equipment. We were so impressed by the balance and bravery of some of the children, whilst the big playground provided the perfect space to practice running safely. We have been to the hall to do some soft play, this was a great opportunity for the children to develop their strength and coordination as they crawled through tunnels and carried blocks to make towers. We finished off the week with a trip to the natural area and what a fantastic time we had! With autumn now upon us, this was a great place to discover lots of the sights, sounds and textures we associate with this season. The children have been fascinated by all the crunchy leaves and have thoroughly enjoyed watching them fall as adults threw piles into the air. So many shiny conkers have also been good fun to search for, feel and post through gaps in the fence, and of course the swings were a huge hit too!
This week in Cygnets we have been very busy continuing with our ‘All About Me’ theme. We have got creative with paints, creating some wonderful masterpieces with our handprints, exploring colours and how they can be changed with colour mixing, making marks with a variety of colours using pens, crayons, pencils etc.
Our messy trays have included sensory play with cereals, pasta, small world people and houses which encouraged some great chats and conversations about people and families.
We have also been developing our skills techniques this week with the use of play doh and tools to create faces, snipping straws with scissors, managing orientation and problem solving with a selection of different puzzles and creating people by connecting Mr Potato Head body parts together.
Next week we are focussing our activities on Autumn so we have also had a great time exploring our natural area where we collected sticks, leaves, conkers and acorns for our autumnal play tray.
This week the Swans have been exploring different forms of mark making. They have used their fingertips to draw in the sand. Practicing pencil control by following dotted lines on a sheet.
The children also used lollipop sticks to scratch away layers of paint to reveal rainbow colours. Mark making in the sand was a great way to practice the movements we had been making and was super fun too! We have been using our imagination when we listened to the "Scribble,Scribble" story. We have continued to talk about ourselves and have had lots of fun decorating face biscuits.
We’ve had a wonderfully creative and energetic week at Pre-School! The children were introduced to Scribble Club and we adventured together into the World of Good Things to explore pre-writing skills centred around the theme of scribbling. We immersed ourselves into activities that develop language, build vocabulary related to colour and texture, foster creativity and imagination and begin to understand that scribbles can carry meaning, have magic properties, and are part of the joy of play and being together. Scribbles carry value as a part of creativity, invention, discovery and making sense of the world and the children have loved meeting ‘Scribble’ and hearing about her adventure to find her puppy and sharing their own spectacular adventures with us through their mark making. The children were fantastic at having their photographs taken, showing lovely patience and big smiles. In the performing arts room, we learned new songs with matching actions, practising how to follow the tempo of the music and using counting fingers for our favourite counting songs. We visited the library, always a magical place to be, and enjoyed choosing books and listening to a story about the book that ate my dog!
We were also lucky to have some bonus sunshine this week, which meant plenty of outdoor exploration – especially in the sand pit, which was a big hit! A gentle reminder please to send in a family photo if you haven’t yet done so for our classroom display. We are also very excited to invite you to our Harvest performance next week on Thursday 2nd at 2.30pm – we can’t wait to see you there!
This week at Nursery
19th September 2025
Autumn has truly arrived at Buckingham Primary Nursery. We've been enjoying our lovely school grounds and have discovered a fantastic array of autumn signs. The children have found vibrant, colourful leaves, lots of spiky shells under the Horse Chestnut trees, and they’ve loved uncovering shiny brown conkers. The path near our Woodland Hall has become crunchy with hundreds of acorns scattered all around. As we wrap up our second full week, I'm happy to share that the children are settling in wonderfully and are so comfortable in their new rooms. Thank you for your continued support!
What a fabulous week we’ve had in the Chicks. This week, we have been focusing on the topic ‘all about me’. As part of this we have been providing the children with a variety of different activities for them to experience and to help them learn all about their own abilities and preferences. We started off the week by having a go at using some pencils and crayons to make marks; everyone showed great determination to hold the writing tools and created lots of lovely, colourful marks on the paper. During the week we have also been exploring our senses with a tuff tray full of different dry foods such as pasta, oats, lentils and cereals. This activity provided a fantastic opportunity to feel lots of different textures and hear lots of new vocabulary as we talked about bumpy pasta, soft oats and crunchy cereals.
Another popular activity this week has been our baby bath station. Everyone loved using the sponges and soapy water to wash the toy babies as we talked about lots of body parts on the babies and found these parts on ourselves and our friends too. On Friday, we did some full body painting - a super messy but super fun activity to round off the week. We have used our hands, feet, legs and arms to spread paint all over the paper as well as experimenting with the feel of paint as the children brushed it all over their bodies too.
Outdoors we are enjoying the turn of the seasons and all the leaves appearing in our garden for us to explore. The children have spent time discovering how dry, crispy leaves can be crumbled in their hands and have loved watching the leaves fall down on them after being thrown in the air. As always, the play house continues to make the perfect hiding spot for a game of peekaboo and to escape from the balls as we practice lots of throwing, kicking and rolling!
This week in Cygnets we have been learning about ourselves with our activities being focussed on the topic 'All about me', we have talked a lot about our different feelings and emotions and colours that represent these from the colour monster story. We have been using our gross motor skills in a variety of ways with physical activities such as parachute games, soft play in the school hall, hula hoops and balancing stilts.
Our messy trays have encouraged sensory play and understanding our body parts and senses with coloured beans, cereal play and colour sorting with coloured blocks. We are creating our own 'what we do at home' board to encourage conversations and discussions about family members and pets and places we visit focussing on discussions of past events. we have received some lovely photos to add to this, if you haven't sent any in, please do so as we would love to add them to our board!
Also, alongside all these we have had many opportunities to create some lovely art work using a variety of different tools to create marks with and a selection of different coloured paints.
We look forward to having more fun next week continuing with the same theme.
This week we have been learning all about our families. We were lucky to be able to visit the school library, the children helped the adults to choose some family books to take back to our room. They all sat beautifully on the library sofa and listened to some stories.
We have been sticking "our family" to strips of paper and talked about who they represented. We also drew our family members on a template of a house and talked the adults who live with us. On Thursday, we welcomed a new friend to our room and showed her how we can share and take turns. This week we have also been doing some yoga, the children were amazing at all of the different poses.
This week in preschool we have been exploring our Fantastic Families and celebrating what makes them so special. The children reflected on their own families and the people they are thankful for, recognising the love and care in all kinds of family relationships. Outdoors, we went on a treasure hunt in the natural area where we discovered acorns, conkers, and beautiful leaves, which we then used to create our own family trees.
Together, we made a colourful class collage, Our Classroom Family, using handprints and plenty of paint – a fun and messy way to celebrate how we all belong! During snack and lunchtimes, we enjoyed talking about how families share food and special moments, and the children loved sharing their own family experiences. We are also so proud of how well the children are getting to know our daily routines, and they have been enjoying the sunshine as much as possible while exploring and playing in the outdoor area.
This week at Nursery
12th September 2025
Our first full week back has been wonderful at Buckingham Primary Nursery. The children have been out and about in our beautiful school grounds and have discovered lots of signs of Autumn. We have experienced a range of weather - sunshine, showers, heavy rain and thunder too. All of the children have been incredibly busy exploring with their friends and taking part in a huge range of activities that have been planned for them by our fabulous team. We ended the week with some very exciting visitors for our older children – dinosaurs came to visit! I hope you enjoy reading all about our week and seeing photos in the Gallery. 
We have had such a wonderful first full week in the Chicks room. This week we have spent lots of time welcoming our new friends and getting to know everyone. The children have all enjoyed exploring both their indoor and outdoor spaces whilst practising a wide variety of skills. Our musical instrument tuff tray has proved very popular as the children explore all the different sounds they are able to make, we definitely have some musicians in the making! Outside, the children loved playing in the house with lots of games of peekaboo with friends. There have also been lots of opportunities to develop our fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination when using the spades in the sandpit for scooping and pouring. We are all so proud of how everyone is settling back into nursery life and we're looking forward to having so much more fun throughout the year!
Cygnets have been busy with child led activities to allow our children to show interests whilst also enabling us to get to know each other. We've explored both inside and outside environments with a visit to our natural area too.
Activities enjoyed and explored included... animals with green rice... to encourage sensory play and imagination.
Play doh... making good use of tools and encouraging spoken language to describe what they are making.
Puzzles.. promoting problem solving, rotating pieces to fit in their correct places.
Mark making with chalks and crayons... both inside and outside.
We have had a great first week back at Nursery. The children have settled in well into their new room, The Swans Room. They have been exploring the room, our outdoor area and we have been talking about our routines. We have welcomed some new friends too. Our focus this week is "All About Me". The children have painted self-portraits and talked about our feelings using The Colour Monster story. The children have loved playing in our home corner and to make it look more like home we would like to display some family photos and would be grateful if you could send some on Famly. Thank you for your support during our first week.
This week in Pre-School our theme has been “What Makes Me a Me?”. We have been thinking about what makes each of us special, exploring our emotions through the story The Colour Monster and sharing the things that make us happy. The children have talked about their likes and dislikes, and we have celebrated the wonderful ways our bodies help us every day. Outdoors, we loved exploring the natural area, collecting acorns and conkers, and having fun on the new swings while enjoying the sunny weather. Music has also been a big part of our week, with plenty of singing – mostly with the guitar and even as a band! We are so pleased with how well the children have settled into their first full week, beginning to get used to routines and growing in confidence each day.
This week at Nursery
5th September 2025
We’ve had a wonderful first two days back here at Buckingham Primary Nursery! The team was delighted to see everyone again, and it’s been lovely watching new friendships form as the children explore their new environment.
We’re also excited to welcome some new faces to our team: Mrs. Lambert, our new Nursery teacher; Marion, who will be leading the Cygnets room; and Ellie-May, who has joined as an apprentice in the Chicks room. We’ve already enjoyed a joyful start filled with fun and laughter.
A gentle reminder that we are now following the new Early Years Foundation Stage Nutrition Guidance. This means children will always have access to fresh water throughout the day, alongside plain milk, while sugary drinks—including fruit juices, squash, and smoothies—are avoided. Please do not provide squash for your child in their bottle.
Please may we request an up to date family photo for our family displays; you can send these in via our Famly app. We would also like our parents in the Cygnets room to send in photos of the children enjoying activities with you at home for our ‘At home we….’ discussion display to stimulate chatter and talk.
Wishing you all a happy and peaceful weekend—we look forward to starting our first full week together on Monday!
This week at Nursery
23rd July 2025
This week at Nursery
18th July 2025
An emotional and happy week at Buckingham Primary Nursery making memories and remembering what we have achieved. It has been our last full week for our term time only children and it has made us reflect on our year together. We have welcomed so many new friends over the year; the nursery is a happy and busy place to be. Many of the rooms have changed, walls have been constructed to make our Swans and Pre-School rooms and we have given the nursery a well-deserved makeover – we have all been busy. The children have all been amazing this year, and have made us so proud with their achievements. New friendships have blossomed, new skills learnt and new knowledge gained all while playing and exploring our amazing school grounds.
In amongst the memory making this week has had a great holiday feel to it! There have been beaches with shells, buckets and spades set up and the children have been packing suitcases with holiday essentials (clothes and party ring biscuits!) to go off on their travels. As always, I am so thankful for my wonderful team of staff who plan and resource the fabulous activities for your children. Enjoy reading all about then in this week’s newsletter.
This week in the Chicks room we have chosen a topic of beaches to finish the school year. The children have all taken a keen interest in our small world beach tuff tray this week and have enjoyed investigating lots of different shells of a variety of shapes and sizes.
We have been very busy with our crafts this week and have decorated our own beach balls with felt tip pens as well as exploring with paint and brushes to design our own colourful ice lollies. The children have come such a long way with their mark making skills and we are so pleased to see everyone enjoying the activities and developing great fine motor skills. Throughout the week we have also been exploring a variety of different textures through our activities. We created a 'taste-safe' beach with crushed cheerio sand and blue dyed rice which the children all loved. This provided a fantastic opportunity to work on their coordination as they used spades to scoop the materials into their buckets, but it was good fun to use our hands too. This week we have also had the playdough out with some shells for the children to make their own choices on how to use these resources. This was a great way to introduce the children to some new textures and materials as well as hearing lots of new language as we moved the squishy playdough in our hands and touched the smooth, bumpy and pointy shells too.
This week in cygnets we have been talking about all the different activities that the children may do while on holiday. The things they all agreed on were, going to the park, going on a picnic, going to the zoo, camping, going on an aeroplane, staying with grandparents and going to the beach.
We have had lots of fun decorating flags to put in our garden or on sandcastles. As a special treat we have also been busy making Rice Krispie cakes which the children absolutely loved. We have had a wonderful time at nursery this week.
The Swans have been under the sea this week. We have been playing some games, guessing sea creatures and animals from their shadows and also watching short film clips to help the children to learn about them. We were also testing our memory with a game which involved hiding a sea related objects and trying to remember which one was missing. The children have been exploring how they can use their bodies to become a variety of different sea creatures including crabs, sharks, dolphins, starfish, jellyfish and an octopus. We even had a few penguins, anemones, mermaids and some rocks!
The children have also made some brightly coloured jellyfish. We have made an ocean using chia seed slime which encouraged the children to use lots of different vocabulary to describe its texture. It was very messy but lots of fun! We had a special delivery too, a letter from his Majesty the King thanking us for the birthday card we sent him, it is on display in the Swans room for everyone to see.
The children in Pre-School have had a focus this week on sharing memories and experiences during their time in nursery. We discussed ideas to understand the concept of a memory being something that you remember and we discovered that we have an awful lot of wonderful memories made during the children’s time here ranging from playing in the sandpit, meeting a bee keeper and exploring our forset area.
We were very fortunate to have a work experience student with us for a few days and he was able to share some of the memories that he made here at Buckingham Primary Nursery which was wonderful. The children shared their memories and drew a picture of them and this work will be coming home. Another piece for you to keep follows a discussion about what the children want to be when they are all grown up. Some fabulous responses included a firefighter, a princess, like my mummy and Spiderman’s dog! We have had a wonderful time sharing them. Phonics this week has focussed on oral blending and segmenting, voice sounds and rhythm and rhyme. The children have really developed their Phase 1 phonics skills ready for September, we are very proud of them all.
This week at Nursery
11th July 2025
Wow – a very hot week at Buckingham Primary Nursery, full of laughter and fun. The children have impressed us so much, they have coped admirably with the heat and sensibly followed instructions when we have needed to stay inside or stay in the shade. Thankfully our amazing team have provided lots of fun water play activities that have hepled the children feel a little cooler!
Thank you to all families supporting us by applying sun cream and providing a hat and water bottle, we really appreciate it. One of our highlights of the week was our Teddy Bear’s Picnics for the Chicks, Cygnets and Swans rooms. The weather was perfect for us and it was so lovely to see those of you who could attend, thank you for coming, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. I can’t believe next week is our last full week for our term time only children. This year has absolutely flown by!
We have had a wonderful week in the sunshine in the Chicks’ room. This week we have been learning all about boats. At the start of the week, the children had a go at using some paint sticks to make marks and develop their fine motor skills to design some very colourful boats. We also had so much fun exploring some bubbly foam outside with some toy boats, the children chose their own way to use the boats with some deciding to push the boats across the foam whilst others used the boats as scoops to transport the foam around the garden. The children have also been creative and have been experimenting with using different shapes stuck on paper to create a boat picture. On Friday we filled the tuff tray with some blue rice and boats for the children to explore. This is a great activity to help explore the children to new textures and to help develop their motor skills as they grasp and transport the rice too - we have done lots of sprinkling and throwing!
We were also thrilled that the sun shone beautifully for our Teddy Bears Picnic on Tuesday. It was fantastic to be able to welcome our parents into Nursery and we hope that everyone had a wonderful time! To help us keep cool in the heat we have been doing some water play too, including exploring our sprinkling splash pad. The children found it fascinating to watch the sprinkling water and had a go at feeling it on their hands too.
This week in Cygnets we have been talking about packing for a holiday and what different clothes we would take to different places with us. We developed our fine motor skills choosing and sticking into a suitcase all the different things we thought we might need for a holiday.
We enjoyed a lovely Teddy Bears Picnic with our children and their families - this was such a lovely morning.
The children have also enjoyed several days of water play to help them keep cool.
The Swans have been talking about holidays this week. We have been listening to stories about going to the beach and all of the different animals and sea creatures we might find.
On Tuesday we invited parents to our Teddy Bear’s picnic where we made teddy masks and collaged bears. It was fantastic to see everyone and hope you all had lots of fun, we loved chatting to you all. We have been learning a new song about a swimming pool which has lots of actions the children can join in with, maybe they might teach it to you too. The children have loved getting a little messy making handprint crabs which look amazing. We have also been practicing our scissor skills when making paper plate jellyfish.
In Pre-School this week we have been working to have a greater understanding of the features of the Summer season. We looked at the different types of weather, clothing, food and plants associated with each season and talked about them using specific language. The children used this focus to carry out a Summer season learning walk around the school grounds. They were able to spot features and tick them off on a Summer Hunt Checklist – we found them all!
Our fine motor skills were developed through drawing our ideas of what summer means to us and this led on to celebrating the uniqueness of all of our names and practising writing them. Our Phase 1 Phonics has had a focus on oral blending and segmenting which is a key skill to grasp in the early stages of reading and writing. Segmenting and blending are fundamental skills in phonics, crucial for both reading and spelling. Segmenting involves breaking down spoken words into individual sounds (phonemes), while blending is the process of combining those sounds to form words. These skills are interconnected and help children develop a strong foundation in literacy. The children have really impressed us with their focus and attention in these sessions – well done everyone!
This week at Nursery
4th July 2025
What a hot week we have just had, the children (and staff!) have coped admirably in the sunshine and heat. Our wonderful forest area has proved to be the perfect shady spot in the nursery grounds, the huge oak tree provides us with shade and a cooler temperature – much time has been spent there exploring and getting creative. Luckily, our children have become avid gardeners so the beans and sunflowers are thriving and the herbs and flowers are doing well thanks to the children’s care and generous watering. We had a very special guest visit our nursery today, Nicki's puppy, Marnie, came to visit. We hope it is the first of very many!
Tomorrow, we have our school Family Fun Day – there will be pony rides, inflatables, street food, rides and go karts and a wide range of traditional games run by the school houses. Please do come along and enjoy the day with us!
This week the children in the Chicks room have been having fun with aeroplanes and helicopters in the clouds! They thoroughly enjoyed their sensory playtime exploring shaving foam and making the planes fly through the fluffy clouds. The helicopters and planes in the cloud tuff tray have been a great way to try out some sound effects and develop language.
The children have focussed carefully when creating some sky scenes. Fine motor skills were developed through sponge printing fluffy white clouds around a plane and on Friday the Chicks experimented with spreading gloopy paint with a brush and adding a range of aircraft and cotton wool clouds. Outdoors has been enjoyed every day, the Chicks loved cooling down by lots of splashing in the water.
This week in Cygnets we have been talking about picnics. The children have been deciding which foods they would like to put in their picnic basket or their lunchbox. Some foods were a lovely treat to have on a picnic!
The children really enjoyed making their own sandwiches, choosing which filling they would like to add and showing some very good fine motor skills when spreading it. We then took all the children for a picnic on the Astro where they had a lovely time eating their fruit and then their sandwiches.
The Cygnets have also enjoyed spending time in the garden, playing with the water and the sand. On Friday Nicki from the Cygnets room gave us a really big treat by bringing her puppy Marnie to visit us all, we loved seeing her!
This week our topic is transport. We began the week by playing a listening game which described lots of different forms of transport. Our tuff tray was turned in to a train track for our trains and small world people to ride on. The children have also been making some imaginative forms of transport out of mobilo, some small and some very long. Our role play area has been transformed into a cafe for us to have a chat, a cup of tea or a tasty snack while we wait for a bus, boat, car or plane.
We have made buses using familiar shapes adding some of the children’s family members on. In our water tray we have had boats & have made our own cork boats, talking about if the children think they will float or sink
In Pre-School this week the children have been developing their understanding of prepositional language. We played a range of listening games using lots of why, who and where questions to reinforce vocabulary ‘sharing, listening, under, on top of, next to, under, in front and behind’. It has been great fun and brilliant to see the turn talking and sharing transferred to the children’s wider play.
The children have been wonderful looking after the strong and healthy plants that they have grown from seeds; they now know what a plant needs to thrive – an awesome job everyone! Phase 1 Phonics this week has been focusing on instrumental and environmental sounds and alliteration; a super preparation for when the children start their Phase 2 learning in Reception.
On Tuesday all the staff were incredibly proud of our Pre-School cohort visiting their new classes. They listened beautifully, followed instructions and took turns, their new teachers were delighted! Most importantly they all had a great time and are keen to start properly in September.
This week at Nursery
27th June 2025
What a fantastic week at Buckingham Primary School, the sun has been shining, the children have been exploring and playing happily. Lots of learning has taken place and plenty of laughter has been heard. The children, as always, have experienced a wonderful range of experiences and activities thanks to our wonderful team. This week I have seen children camping in a real tent, digging for treasure in sand, completing physical challenges set by pirates and making some wonderful smelling Potions and Lotions. We have had a happy and productive week.
We have had another very busy week in the Chicks room and this time, we've been camping! The children have all loved exploring the tent inside this week, it has been the perfect place to hide and play peekaboo as well as for having a lay down. We have been experimenting with the marks we can make when we dip our hands in paint and created some lovely campfire pictures. The children have also been using some sponges to paint with, before sticking on some camping themed pictures to design our own campsite. On Friday we created our own camping lanterns by sticking pieces of red and yellow cellophane onto sticky back plastic, they looked very effective!
As always, we have enjoyed spending lots of time outside in the sunshine every day. The children have enjoyed choosing to have some quiet time, choosing a book to sit on the bench and look through. The farmyard tuff tray has proved to be very popular this week, with the children spending a lot of time moving the animals around and balancing them on top of the wooden block fences. We have also been busy doing lots of digging in the sandpit and exploring the feel of the sand in our hands.
his week in the Cygnets we have been talking about the different ways we might travel when going on holiday. We have been focusing on boats and trains. The children have enjoyed building train tracks, sponge painting using either a boat or a train sponge with different coloured paint.
The Cygnets have also enjoyed exploring in the garden, making and selling ice creams from our ice cream parlour. The sand tray has been popular as they have loved making sandcastles and looking for the hidden pictures buried in the sand.
Oh no those pesky pirates returned to the Swans room in Nursery this week but this time they set us some physical challenges to complete. The children were amazing at jumping, hopping and balancing, in fact they were so good they found the pirate treasure, each child took a gold coin home.
We have been drawing our own wanted posters with a reward if we can find any of them. The children have been decorating swords and hats so they really look like pirates now. To finish the week, we made some rather yummy pirate treasure biscuits too.
Pre-School have had a lot of fun this week understanding the role of a firefighter and how they help us. Our focus book was My Mummy is a Firefighter by Kerrine and Jason Bryan. My Mummy is a Firefighter is about a brave Firefighter mother who is an inspiration to her daughter. It takes you and on a journey through the brave and admirable working day of our heroine mummy, showing her daughter that she can be brave, strong and conquer her fears. The children have experienced all sorts of fire related activities from working together and cooperate to make an obstacle trail to put out a ‘fire’ to cleaning chalk fires with their fire extinguishers to being creative when making a hot colours fire collage. Numbers 1 to 5 have been a focus too, recognising digits and collecting the correct number of sticks. On Tuesday, we were really excited to have a Firefighter visit us and talk about his job and what he needs to wear to stay safe. Thank you very much Phoebe’s daddy for taking the time to support us, we really appreciate it.
In Phonics this week we have been focusing on instrumental sounds, rhythm and rhyme and voice and environmental sounds. We are all excited for transition day next week. The children’s new teachers have been, and will continue to, come up to nursery and touch base with the cohort – they very much looking forward to spending the morning with their new classes.
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 2nd June so we look forward to seeing all our term time only children again on Tuesday 3rd 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 80th 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 22nd 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 10th 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 14th February, we have our INSET day. Nursery will be closed to all children as is the main school. The following week, beginning Monday 17th 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 20th December, please remember to look at the Christmas dates that were sent out, the all year round children return on Thursday 2nd January and the term time only children on Monday 6th 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 11th 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 4th 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.
