There Has Been 'Commotion in the Ocean' in Nursery This Week
The Dragonflies began the week by diving deep down into the ocean.
On Tuesday, we read ‘Commotion in the Ocean’. This book encouraged the children to explore ocean animals and where they live. Following on from this, the children discovered some similarities and differences between the sea animals’ habitats and our own. The children then had the opportunity to create their own ocean habitat by painting a paper plate blue to represent the water. The children then used their creative stills to add green seaweed, orange sand and colourful corral made from tissue paper.
On Wednesday, the children read the book again and discovered that it was a rhyming book! This inspired the children to create some funny rhyming sentences, including a fox wearing socks in a box, a pig wearing a wig and a frog sitting on a log with a dog.
During maths this week, the Dragonflies were learning to compare amounts. In pairs, the children used the fishing rods to catch some fish from the water tray. They were able to count how many they had caught and worked with the teacher to explore who had more and who had less.
After flying above and beyond to space last week, the Butterflies and Ladybirds have dived down into the depths of the oceans this week and have begun to find out about the variety of sea life living there. To begin the week, we watched a small clip of the ocean, and the children identified the creatures with which they were familiar. They then painted their favourite sea creature and used sea shaped sponges to create some ocean scenes.
The children have been learning to identify 2D shapes this half term and on Wednesday, poor Rainbow Fish lost all her scales whilst on her way to share them with her friends. The Ladybirds were set a mission to find all the different shaped scales hidden outside and then matched them to the missing gaps on Rainbow Fish's body, practicing naming them as they did it. The Butterflies went on a magical ocean hunt to discover a rainbow of seahorses hiding around the school grounds. They listened carefully to prepositional clues to help find them and practiced identifying their colours.
The classroom has been a hive of activity as the children have been busy working on a beautiful under-the-sea project, and have designed their own sea creatures ranging from, rainbow fish, sharks, and whales to seahorses.
Finally, on Friday, our music session was the perfect excuse to find out how different sea creatures move. The children moved their bodies in various ways, developing their gross motor skills, whilst listening to 'Aquarium# by Camille Saint-Saens.
Mrs Manchorova and Miss Wadman
