Donaldson Class Nursery

St Mary's Early Years Centre

At St Mary's Early Years Centre we provide our children with a creative and stimulating environment, designed and led by a qualified teacher. Children are happy, engaged, challenged, nurtured and feel safe. Here, your child will develop a curiosity and love for learning through self chosen play and adult guided activities. We ensure children leave us ready for school and the next stage of their learning. We provide spaces for children from the age of 2 in our Rosen Classroom led by a qualified practitioner and we offer both funded and fee paying places. 

 

Hours

We offer flexible hours in our 3 and 4 year old room, opening at 8:30am until 3:30pm. We offer 30 hour full time places for 3 and 4 year olds from 9am-3pm with the option to extend from 8:30am-3:30pm. We also offer 15 hour places across Monday to Friday. These have to be taken as either 5 morning sessions from 8:30am-11:30am or 5 afternoon sessions from 12:30pm-3:30pm. 

We accept 30 hour childcare codes. Please obtain your code from the website www.childcarechoices.gov.uk.

 

For further information please contact Miss Edwards on 01322 665212. 

Welcome to Donaldson Class!

 

Hello my lovely Donaldson's

These are our class rules:

We share and take turns.

We walk in nursery.

We keep our nursery tidy.

We play together and we are kind to our friends.

A Day in The Life at Nursery.

Please look at our video resource page for a video to look around our garden.

Come and Play in our Early Years Foundation Stage
Lots of our activities are set up using tuff trays, here are some examples of ones we have used.
Developing gross motor skills are very important, as children need to master these skills to help them to write and form letters. These muscles are developed by encouraging the children to take part in physical activities, such as climbing, balancing, dancing and crawling.
In nursery we do lots of 'Funky Finger' activities, this helps the children with their fine motor skills. These activities help the children to develop the muscles in their fingers, which will help the children develop their writing skills.

Our fantastic classroom displays

Happy Christmas to you all, love from the EYFS staff

Term 2 

Welcome back after half term, we hope you had a good rest after a very long term. This term we are looking at Traditional Tales and then we will be celebrating Christmas. First we are exploring Diwali and Bonfire Night. The stories we are looking at are, The Enormous Turnip, Goldilocks and The Three Bears and The Three Little Pigs. We are looking forward to a very exciting term.

Our lovely Eleni told us a fabulous story today !

Mary and Joseph 

By 

Eleni 

 

When Mary and Jesus were born they were Christians. When Jesus was born the Angel came to tell Mary about Jesus, they sang a wonderful song. Now the angels and boys, now Mary and the donkey they go to see somebody, the talked to the Innkeeper. "I'm sorry, I can't do anything to help you". Mary and Joseph went to the stable. "These gifts are not for you, your majesty, they are for the new King". So, they rode camels and Joseph told everyone about Mary. The Innkeeper had a beard ! When Mary rode on the donkey and then baby Jesus was born in the stable. The King was carrying a gift for Jesus. Joseph kissed Mary because he loved her. The Kings came in and showed Jesus what they had brought. The Angels sang a beautiful song and the star shone bright !

On Monday we received an email from Father Christmas telling us that Rudolph was poorly and he needed our help to make him better before Christmas Eve. So we found him a safe place to spend the night and we talked about all the things that would make Rudolph feel better.

We made a list of things then we found them and put them into his tent. 

That night Rudolph came and rested in the tent we had got ready for him. To say thank you he left us some cookies to enjoy. Our cameras caught him resting and feeling much better.

Thank You Father Christmas and Rudolph for our cookies.

We worked as a team to put the numbers in order

We used natural materials for our maths

We made pictures of trees using natural materials in the style of Andrew Goldsworthy

We were very excited putting up our christmas tree

In maths we have been making 5 using playing cards

We enjoy playing with the bats and balls and the balls in the garden

Today we celebrated Children in Need day. We came in dressed in our Pudsey clothes, made spotty biscuits and even had a visit from Pudsey Bear.

Dennis the dinosaur has arrived to help us get ready for Christmas

For breakfast we had firework toast. We mixed milk and food colouring, then we painted our bread. Mrs Orpin toasted it for us and we enjoyed it for our breakfast.

We made firework and bonfire pictures using toilet rolls, sticks and straws and lots of glitter

We made Diva Lamps using clay and sparkly gems

 Term 1

Welcome back everyone and a big welcome to our new children. We hope you all had a lovely summer and are ready to take on lots of new experiences.

We start our year with looking at prepositions, we do all our learning from books, our first 2 books are 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' by Michael Rosen and 'Rosie's Walk' by Pat Hutchins.

Keep an eye out for updates showing all our activities.

Today was Tickle Pink Day and we all wore something pink to nursery. We had lots of fun with all our friends from reception and Miss Runackles Nursery playing and learning outside in the garden. Even Mrs Shelton wore pink today !!

Today we went on a Bear Hunt in our garden

We made Rosie the Hen using shapes

Look at our fantastic Bear Hunt maps

We had a sensory Bear Hunt. We took our shoes and socks off and used our feet to experience different textures.

Today we went on a bear hunt in our growing forest school. Mrs Malone took us through the forest and helped us find the bear. It was great fun.

A big thank you to all our lovely parents for the conkers. The children have really enjoyed using them in the outside kitchen

We have really enjoyed our first ballet class, wearing our new tutu's

Our great dancing

Still image for this video

The goodbye song

Still image for this video

We have had lots of fun exploring our nursery and garden

We would like to wish all the children moving onto reception the best of luck and remember to show your new teachers that you are truly amazing ! We look forward to seeing the children remaining with us in September. Finally Mrs Shelton and Mrs Orpin would like to thank all the children for an amazing year and they have enjoyed every minute of it.

Finally our trip to Africa had arrived !!!! July 2024

The animals were waiting in the garden and the activities were ready for when we arrived

Breakfast was served on the plane