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

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.

We are in Term 6, the last term with some of our lovely children before they continue their journey into reception. Our topic is water and we are looking at 2 books 'The Bog Baby' by Jeanne Willis and we finish the year with 'Tiddler' by our favourite author Julia Donaldson. This term we hope to play with lots of water, if the sun arrives ! We have a challenge week and we finish the term and our year with a Graduation celebration and a trip to Africa.

Finally our trip to Africa had arrived !!!!

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

Breakfast was served on the plane

We had a fabulous water day in the beautiful weather

Mrs Shelton has kept us working hard even though we are nearly at the end of term

Good luck England !!!!

The final challenge of the week was the pom pom and spoon challenge. We had to transfer the pom pom along the spoons to the pot at the end.

The ice cube challenge. We all had an ice cube, a small pot of salt and a small pot of warm water. The winner was the one who got their ice cube to melt the quickest.

Stacking cup challenge. We had 15 cups to stack in a pyramid shape and the fastest time won.

Friday the last day of challenges, we started with a domino challenge. We had to stand the dominoes up, we had 30 seconds and the winner was the person who stood the most up.

This challenge made us laugh, we had to lay down between 2 hoops and move the balls from 1 hoop to another. The fastest time won.

We had a rest from our challenges today and we watched a great show 'The Teddy Bears Picnic', we all brought our teddy's to nursery and they really enjoyed the show with us

This afternoon we used our throwing skills by throwing the javelin, discus and shot put. We also had a speed challenge by collecting 10 objects one at a time in the quickest time. Our final challenge of the day was to collect loom bands on a paint brush, we needed good hand eye co ordination to complete this, the largest amount collected was 36.

Loom band challenge

Our next challenges involved jumping, a standing jump and high jump. Our longest standing jump was 102cm and our highest high jump was 45cm

Day 3 was full of challenges, the first one was to see how many beads we could thread in 1 minute.

The challenge was to build the tallest tower

This was our hardest challenge today, we had to sort 25 coloured balls into the right buckets. Mrs McGarrigle demonstrated !!

Day 2 of Challenge week. We started the day with a marble challenge. We had to use the tweezers to move 30 marbles into a pot, the fastest time was the winner.

Challenge 4, the final challenge of the day was to transport water using a flower pot, this was a lot of fun !!!

Challenge 3 was a Floating and Sinking challenge. We had to predict if the object would float or sink.

Challenge number 2 was to blow the longest bubble. All of EYFS joined together it was lots of fun !!

Today was the start of our 'Challenge' Week. We started the day with a sand challenge. We had to fill the pot with sand the quickest way we could. Some of us used different sized spoons and someone used their hands.

Our first book

Painting Water Lilies in the style of Claude Monet

Painting pictures of Bog Babies

Our Bog Babies feel at home

To make our Bog Babies feel at home we collected some natural materials to put in their homes

We made our Bog Baby a home

We made Bog Babies using blue salt dough, 2 goggly eyes, 2 feathers for wings and a pipe cleaner for a tail

We have reached Term 5 and the start of the summer terms, hopefully we will have some lovely summer sun. This term we are looking at rhyming and we are using 2 books from our favourite author Julia Donaldson, they are 'What The Ladybird Heard' and 'The Gruffalo'.

Today we celebrated Children's Mental Health week and we all wore green to Nursery

We have been looking at measurement using the water and learning to use the scales

When the sun was shinning we had a picnic for our lunch in our garden

We have made bird feeders using juice boxes to feed the birds in our garden

We played musical instruments outside to make the sounds of our animals in our story

Mrs Shelton set us a challenge to order our numbers using team work

We used ladybirds in our maths

We were able to hatch our own butterflies thanks to one of our mums

We have been painting farm animals in the style of Yayoi Kusama

Enjoying the weather outside

Term 4 - Spring is on its way so we will be exploring minibeasts and their environments and how minibeasts and flowers grow. Our first book is 'The Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle, then we will read 'Handa's Surprise' by Eileen Browne and our last book is 'Anna Hibiscus' by Atinuke. 

Hopefully we will be able to grow some plants this term to make our garden look better.

Our seeds have started to grow !

We have been enjoying lots of Easter craft

Have a look at our Easter phonics

Making Marshmellow Rice Krispie Cakes

 

First we had to weight the marshmellows and the butter out using the scales. Then we melted them in the microwave. Mrs Shelton added yellow food colouring and gave the mixture a good mix. We then pressed the mixture into trays and put them in the freezer for 15 minutes. Once they had set we decorated them with sprinkles added eyes and a beak.

We made marshmellow rice krispie cakes for the cake sale

We made marshmellow chicks today for Easter

We are working hard on our number bonds

We have been working hard with our sounds

Wearing odd socks for Down Syndrome awareness day

We made rainbow bagels today. We mixed food colouring with water or milk, then we painted our bagels. After we toasted them. They were delicious !

Mrs McGarrigle came to help us to write

Today we made number bond men

We had lots of lovely costumes for World Book Day

We talked about our favourite Julia Donaldson books and voted for the one we enjoyed the best

We made masks for World Book Day from The Gruffalo written by our favourite author

Our first story

Today we played number bond dominoes remembering to wait for our turn and that the dominoes had to equal 5

We had a minibeast tray set up inside so we could still search for bugs

Today it was sunny so we went on a minibeast hunt, we found lots of bugs and we looked at the flowers to see if any bugs were hiding

We have played dominoes and ladybird numberbonds to 5

We ordered our story using pictures

Making cocoons and decorating butterflies

Term 3 - Welcome to term 3 we hope you all had a lovely Christmas. This term we are exploring Dinosaurs, we will be learning lots of facts about them. The first book we are reading is 'Cave Baby' by Julia Donaldson, our favourite author. Our next book is 'Mad About Dinosaurs' by Giles Andreae and David Wojtowycz, it tells us lots of information about dinosaurs.

We made dinosaurs in the style of Andrew Goldsworthy, we used dinosaur templates and natural materials

Seby printed on his dinosaur

Our dinosaurs made from a paper plates are fabulous

We had a great 'Number Day', we made posters of our favourite number and found things in the playground to match numbers

We have been exploring height and length, so today we put ourselves in order of height to see who was the tallest and who was the shortest, then we laid down to see if the same person was the longest and the same one was the smallest

We have been measuring dinosaurs using cubes

Garrett has been working really hard on his number bonds, we are really proud of him

We built skeleton dinosaurs

We did observational drawings of dinosaurs

Making fossils using play dough and dinosaur bones using clay

We have been using dinosaurs to help us with our literacy

Term 2 Topic Web

Term 2 - This term we are looking at traditional tales, we will be reading 'The Enormous Turnip', Goldilocks and the Three Bears' and 'The Three Little Pigs'. Then we will be celebrating Christmas, making lots of decorations and learning lots of Christmas songs. 

All ready for our pamper day

We enjoyed relaxing in the foot spas while watching a Christmas film

Time for popcorn !

We enjoyed making reindeer food to make sure Santa's reindeers fly high on Christmas Eve

Next we visited the beauty salon for nails and hair

We finished our lovely day making reindeer cakes

Today we decorated biscuits and a gingerbread house for our cake sale tomorrow

We enjoyed our Christmas dinner today, the 2 year old room joined us.

We have been doing Christmas maths and literacy

We decorated bags ready for all the Christmas decorations we are going to make

We made different flavoured porridge and we tried them all and then we decided which one we liked the best

We have been talking about Diwali and rangoli patterns. We made our own diva lamps and had lots of goes at making patterns

We have made lots of poppies for Remeberance Sunday to remember all the soldiers

We have done lots of firework pictures using different techniques

Using all the vegetables we had drawn we made soup with them

We drew pictures of lots of different vegetables

We have made pictures using fruit and vegetables in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Topic Web - Autumn 1

Term 1 - Welcome back and a big welcome and hello to all our new children that are starting. 

This term our topic is 'prepositions'. For the first 2 weeks we are learning about ourselves, we have been talking about our families and were we live. We are going to read 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' by Michael Rosen and the last book we are looking at this term is 'Rosie's Walk' by Pat Hutchins.  

We went on a bear hunt. First we went over the grass

Then we went through the mud

Then we went through the river in our wellies

We then reached the forest

Oh no a snowstorm

Oh no we found the cave

Back through the snow storm

Back through the forest

Back through the water

Back through the mud

Back over the grass

Home to bed ! We are never gong on a Bear Hunt again !!

We have drawn our own Bear Hunt maps

Our Bear Hunt tuff tray

We are reading 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt', we have been making paper plate bear faces and we made a bear using 2D shapes

We drew pictures of who lives in our house.

We have talked about ourselves, the colour of our skin, eyes and hair, then we painted portraits of ourselves