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.

a day in the life of Nursery.pdf

Have a look at our outside area

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 6

Sadly this is our last term with our lovely children before most of them will be leaving us for reception.

Our topic for this term is water and we have lots of fun with it. Our books are 'Bog Baby' and 'Tiddler', written by our favourite author. We also have sport challenge week to look forward to as well as a trip to Africa and finally our children's Graduation.

We have had a fantastic water day

We have been making the most of the weather

Moving balls from one hoop to another

We had to sort 40 balls into colours. Who was the quickest ?

How long does it take to move 30 marbles ?

Fishing for loom bands

How much water can you transport in a minute ?

How many beads can you thread in a minute ?

Stacking cups, how quick could we make a tower of 15 ?

Standing jump, who could jump the furthest ?

Making towers, who could build the tallest tower ?

Sand challenge, we had to fill the pot in the quickest time

Term 5

Welcome back we hope you all had a lovely Easter break.

This term our topic is creatures great and small. We are looking at 'What the Ladybird Heard' books by Julia Donaldson and one of our favourite stories 'The Gruffalo' again by our author Julia Donaldson. Hopefully the sun will shine and we will have lots of outside time in our garden.

We had great fun planning and planting our allotment

We have been learning about odd and even numbers

We have been using ladybirds to help us with our maths

Term 4

This term we are exploring minibeast and growing. We will be talking about rhyming words, sequencing stories and healthy eating. We will hopefully have lots of fun outside as the weather is beginning to improve.

Our books this term will be 'The Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle,'Handa's Surprise' by Eileen Browne and 'Anna Hibiscus Song' by Antinuke.

We had a visit to the forest school today, to search for minibeasts

Today was Downs Syndrome awareness day, we wore odd socks to raise awareness

We have really enjoyed the sun today, we even had our lunch in the garden

We have been reading the 'Magic Key' adventure stories in our nursery, today we went on our own adventure and built a pirate ship and drew treasure maps.

We made fantastic mini beasts using natural materials

We really enjoyed World Book Day, we can dressed in our pyjamas and brought our favourite story book and bedtime teddy. All the teachers swopped round and read stories in different classes and we made a collage of one of our favourite books by our class author

We made some fantastic 2D shaped minibeasts

Term 3

This term we have been looking at dinosaurs, we have painted them, measured them, weighed them, sorted them and talked and sung about them.

Our stories have been 'Cave Baby' and 'Mad About Dinosaurs'.

We had a visit to the Forest School. We had to hunt for dinosaurs, we had binoculars and magnifying glasses to help us. We had time to explore and we had a go at cave painting and had a tuff tray to explore. Mrs Malone made us a camp fire and we had a look at different dinosaur teeth. The best part was that we finished with a biscuit.

We decorated dinosaurs using all different materials

We finally was able to play outside in the garden.

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

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 have been doing lots of christmas phonic and maths activities

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.