The last two weeks, nursery have been focusing on the book ‘The Gingerbread Man’ by Alan MacDonald and what fun we have had! Our first week started off by introducing the story to the class. The children were later surprised and shocked to see flour footprints across the classroom on Tuesday, some claiming it to be Father Christmas! Together as a group, many ideas were thrown around about who the footprints could have belonged to. One option from the children included walking in the snow (the tiniest flurry of snow we had in the morning!) but after checking our shoes, we could see they were clean. Their memories were jogged when it was highlighted that a gingerbread man was hiding in our role play kitchen. One child said “I think it was the Gingerbread Man who ran away as fast as it could and out the door”. How correct they were! The rest of the week has seen us read the story multiple times, adding in actions to verbs throughout the book, using junk modelling to create boats for the gingerbread man, gingerbread playdough, as well as going on a journey in our outside provision to look for characters from the book hiding under the blocks, in the sand tray or on the bikes. To end the week, we made very yummy gingerbread men.
This week, we have touched upon the story again focusing on nouns and adding actions to those too. The children have made salt dough gingerbread men and decorated with their favourite colours. Finally, we finished our 2 weeks by acting out the story to the class. Everyone joined in, whether it be playing an important role in the story or joining in with the repeated refrains.
In our maths carpet sessions this week, we have been learning all about length and the vocabulary, long and short. To help the children with this concept, we used cubes to create different length lines. Some were long and some were short and the children were then able to successfully recognise and name their lines. This continued in our outdoor provision too by making an obstacle course with various length planks of wood and using our imagination to pull an ‘enormous turnip’ (space hopper) from the ground with the longest line winning!
This week also brings in some new aspects of learning. We have started ‘Dough Disco’ and ‘Squiggle Wriggle’; two techniques to help strengthen the muscles in the fingers to support with mark making and eventually writing. This week, we started with the movement ‘Up and Down’ in squiggle wriggle, using gross motor movements with scarves and then transferring those to pen and paper. Everyone did a great job!
