Nursery White Christmas Remembered….

As promised in our last post here’s  a quick recap of what the nursery got up to in the run up to Christmas.  I have to say the pre-Christmas season literally flew at Santa’s sleigh speeds this year,  but our students packed more activities in each day than the elves who load up Santa’s presents!

🙂

The Junior class got the ball rolling with their seasonal tree display.

Winter Tree

Teaching history in the 2-6 age group begins with simple concepts such as what happens in a childs day, the concepts of morning, afternoon, evening and night,  days of the week and of course the seasons.  The seasonal tree takes a prominent place in classroom for discussion and observation with the children.

P-p-p-pick up our penguins!

Continuing on their Antarctic journey the junior students learned about the penguin in circle time, creating penguin art and learning their poem about  Playful Penguins!

Playful Penguin Poetry!

In the Senior class we were busy too, decorating our class for the festive season, making Christmas cards and decorations for home and lots of singing! 🙂

Christmas Cards and Paperchains.

Arts and Crafts are important in the 2-6 age group, creating things to take

Busy making garlands.

home and learning to express ourselves artistically gives the children a confidence in their abilities alongside having great things to take home to treasure. The skills involved in cutting, sticking, stapling, glueing, painting and colouring all develop hand eye coordination and fine motor skills. The sense of accomplishment in the finished product encourages children to complete the projects they start, these are many of the building blocks to the competent learner and member of society.

Some examples of what we were doing

Advent Wall

Christmas Weaths

Christmas Angels

Of course the seasonal theme didn’t end with arts and crafts or music, we began our Christmas counting.

Christmas Counting stage 1

Much like our Halloween counting we had a Christmas stocking filled with items to count from 1-5. As it turned out to be so popular we were all very proficient at 1-5 and I had hoped to move to 6-10 but the weather had other plans and the snow disrupted our progress somewhat.

Discussing the snowglobe

Still we really enjoyed examining and counting our Christmas cornucopia. 🙂  It’s a lovely work and alongside enhancing concrete number skills it added much to our language and vocabulary as we talked about each item and our experience of it. It also calls to the sensorially sensitive child, using our tactile and visual senses to group the items into similar and different items for counting.  The  snowglobe (pictured left) was particularly entrancing to the students.  I’m thinking in the summer we might make glitter globes as these two in the counting were so popular.

And finally once the numbers were laid out and the contents of the stocking examined our work looked like this…

One Angel, Two Snowglobes, Three Snowmen......

Our practical life work also took on a festive aspect, adding cinnamon and nutmeg to the sieving work, scenting the work with a Christmas air. We added glitter to our pouring water, and Christmas pompoms and mini baubles to our transferring work.

A break from festive themed work we were lucky to be given a pre-christmas gift from a mom of one of our teachers. Our wooden marble run!

Marble Run

Building this in a team and taking turns running the marbles through the maze was a very popular activity and gave us many learning and laughing experiences.

Taking turns on our marble run.

The last Christmas project the Nursery students would like to share with you was our extra large Santa complete with sleigh, reindeer and toys! This took us four afternoons of painting, glittering, glueing, and giggling. We were very proud of it. 🙂 And we hope the man himself visited your house as he was very generous to us all in the nursery! 🙂

Santa Claus Came to Town!

Thanks for reading and enjoying all our work. Come back soon for a review of our eventful christmas gala production. 🙂 And a host of posts from the big school on their work in the past three weeks. 🙂

Huge thank you from the staff and students of the Nursery!