Welcome back to our returners and welcome to our new Ladybirds. We hope you had a great holiday.
This week Ladybird class have been very busy, they have been welcoming our new children and showing them all the nice things we have in our nursery and making new friends. This term our topic is ‘Growing Together’. As part of the topic the children will be trying different coloured fruits and vegetables every week, we then we do our weekly voting to see which one was the most popular. This helps the children make choices and experience different flavours which they may not have tried before. Our story for the next two weeks will be “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. This is a very popular book within the nursery and we are able to incorporate lots of different movements as the children hunt for the bear e.g. moving their arms around using their legs to run or tip toe etc.
The children have had an exciting two weeks as the “Living Eggs” arrived. The children have had the opportunity to observe the life cycle of a chick. The eggs were in the incubator and all numbered, we asked the children which number they thought would hatch first. Then the wait began. Each day the children would check in several times to see what number egg had hatched. By Wednesday all the eggs had hatched and we now had 10 fluffy chicks. The children were still checking them regularly each day as the chicks grew very fast. They have seen how they come out of the egg all wet and straggly, they then dry out and turn fluffy and within a few days to a week they begin to get “adult” feathers. Last week they were still kept in a heated tank because they needed to learn how to regulate their own body temperature. This week the chicks were big and strong enough for the children to have a little hold if they wanted to. A few children at a time were taken to hold or stroke the chicks. Most children were happy to do this but some just wanted to observe them. They were very gentle and had to use small voices so as not to frighten the chicks, at the end of the week the chicks were put onto a black tray with some different foods to try and the children watched to see which food they preferred, they had a choice of apple, cucumber, cracker or popcorn, they liked the popcorn best. This has been an amazing experience for the children and it has given them an opportunity that some children may not have experienced before. I want to say well done to all of Ladybird class for listening well and being very gentle with these babies.
