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. We open 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 can be taken as 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.

Prepositions Autumn 1 - 2022.pub

Traditional Stories Autumn 2 - 2022.pub

Dinosaurs - Spring 1 - 2023.pub

Growing - Spring 2 - 2023.pub

Rhyming - Summer 1 - 2023.pub

Water - Summer 2 - 2023.pub

Term 4 - This term we are looking at growing, we will be able to plant seeds and see how they grow. We are reading the story of 'The Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle. We have been doing lots of fun activities about our book.

We all became scientists and we carried out an experiment to see what would happen when we added paint to snow and then let it melt !

All the children added paint

This is what happened to our snow !

We had a fantastic world book day. We dressed up, chose our favourite book and drew a character from that book.

Making spider webs using pva glue and glitter

We made cocoons for our toys and even made cocoons for ourselves

Making Isla a cocoon

Painting minibeasts

Making mini beasts using green playdough

We have even been doing caterpillar maths and phonics

We are making repeating pattern caterpillars using our hands to make them.

Term 3 - This term we at looking at dinosaurs. The first book we are look at is 'Cave Baby' by our favourite author Julia Donaldson.

Friday 20th February we had a Growth Day, we looked after our well being and had a pamper day and a ballet lesson.

Today was number day, we came to nursery wearing numbers and we had lots of activity to have a go at all about numbers.

We have made a book of our own Cave Baby stories

We enjoyed learning about ball skills with Miss Bracken our sports coach.

Junk model dinosaurs

We made shape dinosaurs using paper plates and lots of different shapes

We made a dinosaur skeleton using the bones we had excavated from the sand.

We had a visit from a life sized dinosaur today, her name was Recyclasaurus. She was made out of lots of recyclable materials.

Reception joined us and we had to estimate how long Recyclasaurus was.

We wondered how wide she was

If we used Nursery children would it take more or less children ?

We then filled Recylasaurus with children. How many children do you think we fitted in her ?

Her legs were as big as a nursery child.

Mrs Shelton worked us really hard, we had to find initial sounds of objects and blend words to match objects

We were paleontologists excavating for dinosaur bones.

We had an exciting discovery in Nursery

We made dinosaur bones using clay and grey playdough

We have painted the characters from our story and lots of stripes, stars, spots and zig zags.

Finding out about dinosaurs

Term 2 - This term we are looking at Traditional Tales, our first story is 'The Enormous Turnip'.

Our snowy garden

Today was Christmas dinner day, we made elf hats and we wore our christmas jumpers

We used food colouring to colour the snow, then we waited to see what would happen

Using our froggy fingers !

Today we performed our Nativity, we were fabulous !!! Here we are dressed in our costumes

Today we have had a relaxing day, foot spas, foot massages and painted nails, all ready for our Nativity performances tomorrow,

Even maths and phonics have included Christmas this week

Christmas has finally arrived in Nursery

We had Ballet today in the hall and the 2 year old's joined in with us

Little bunnies dance

Little bunnies dance.

Sleeping babies

Jack in the box

Jack in the box.

Dancing with pom poms

Dancing with pom poms.

Dancing penguins

Dancing penguins.

Animal freeze

Dancing bunnies

Dancing with scarves

Wiggle wiggle

Today we came to nursery in our Pudsey Clothes or spots, for Children in Need

Bollywood dancing was great fun !

Watch us doing our fabulous dancing

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Afternoon children dancing

Part 2

Part 3

We enjoyed using a potato to make poppies for our remembrance garden.

After watching the fireworks at the weekend we made fantastic firework pictures.

We acted out our story 'The Enormous Turnip'

We talked about Diwali and how people celebrated it, we then made our own diva lamp and had a go at Rangoli patterns.

We have looked at lots of different vegetables, we have drawn them, made playdough vegetables and we have made pictures using them.

Once we had finished using our vegetable we made soup for our snack time.

How we made our soup.

Term 1 - This term our topic is prepostions. Our first book is 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' by Michael Rosen.

Today was our Growth Day. We have been very busy, first we talked about autumn vegetable especially pumpkins, we felt and smelt them, then we drew them. Mrs Shelton cut one and we talked about saving the seeds to plant in the spring. We then tided our allotment and saw some pumpkins growing, we cleared the weeds ready to plant seeds in the spring. We then had a ball skills lesson in the hall with Miss Bracken, we played games and learnt how to use a ball. We then had a story about Jack and the Beanstalk which was about Jack growing a giant beanstalk. During our maths we learnt that numbers get bigger as you count so we grew to the number 10. To end our day we did some mindful stretching to relax and get ready to go home.