Little Elvers Nursery

                                 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to our nursery page!

Adults in our nursery:

Mrs Natalie Reali  Dr Anna Sandfield        Mrs Claire Lloyd                  

EYFS Lead and Class Teacher        Class Teacher (M-W)    Learning Support Assistants

Miss Isabel Pile                      Miss Tanjum Choudhury

Our learning: 

Here at Little Elvers, we have lots of fun following the children's interests to guide our learning. The children love learning through play in our engaging indoor and outdoor environments. We also use the Primary Knowledge Curriculum to enhance the children's learning. 

Spring Term 1 - Dinosaurs

Primary Knowledge Curriculum Unit	This half term, our Primary Knowledge Curriculum unit is called ‘Dinosaurs’. We will learn that dinosaurs lived a very long time ago. We will also learn that palaeontologists are people who study dinosaurs.  You can find a knowledge organiser here: Dinosaurs
Characteristics of Effective Learning	The children settled in beautifully last term. They will help the new children to settle into our class routines. They will be engaging and playing with the learning resources in our indoor and outdoor areas. We will be supporting the children to ‘have a go’ at new activities and persist with activities when challenges occur.
Personal, Social and Emotional Development	We will be learning how to share resources and find solutions to problems they may encounter during play. We will be using “stop please” with a raised hand to help the children communicate with others. We will be learning about the emotions of happy, sad and angry. We will also learn about our school rules of "Safe, Ready and Respect".
Physical Development	We will be exploring gross motor skills including large-scale mark-making and fine-motor skills. A range of outdoor equipment is available to help the children develop their gross motor skills. Different fine motor skills activities are available for the children to try, as well as a large variety of other learning resources that use fine motor skills.
Communication and Language	We will be exploring how to talk to friends politely and how to manage play in a kind and considerate way. We will be learning the words ‘dinosaurs’, ‘fossils’ and ‘palaeontologists’ through our Primary Knowledge Curriculum Unit.
Literacy	In Little Elvers, we have a lovely reading nook with a large variety of fiction and non-fiction books. We have a daily story time in which a book is shared with the children.  Mark making opportunities are always available for the children to explore.
Maths	We will practice reciting numbers to 5. We will make a start at delving deeper into each number to really understand what each number means and how you could represent it. Alongside this, we will start to build our understanding of 2D shape.
Understanding the World	We will be learning all about dinosaurs that lived a very long time ago. Fossils tell us what life was like a very long time ago.
Expressive Arts and Design	The children always have access to a variety of craft materials in order to express themselves and have fun creating! We will be printing using toy dinosaurs and creating dinosaur sculptures using clay.

 

Weekly newsflash:

W/C 24.03.25

This week we have welcomed a fascinating animal visitor - Ava the snake visited us! The Little Elvers have watched her and asked lots of wonderful questions. We have found out about where snakes live in the wild, what they eat and where they live. We have been reading stories, like 'We're Different, We're the Same', that teach us that we can notice and value the differences between us and know that we are all welcome, all wonderful and all part of the same community. We have also been finding out about the NSPCC Pants rule, an important aspect of learning to keep our bodies safe. The Little Elvers have continued to watch the chicks grow and change and seen their feathers developing. A wonderful large chicken collage, that the children have created together, has taken its place on our wall alongside a papier mache ladybird that the children created and painted, who has not said a word! 

W/C 17.03.25

This week we were joined by some amazing animal visitors in Little Elvers. On Monday our special eggs arrived and we learned about how to keep them safe whilst the chicks finished growing inside. On Wednesday, it was a wonderful experience to see the chicks hatching and show our chicks to the adults and children who visited us from around our school community. We also made some new friends on Wednesday afternoon when Elaine and her lovely, gentle dog Sweep visited us to talk to us about how to look after and be safe with dogs. The children listened to Elaine and asked brilliant questions as well as sharing their experiences. This week, Mrs Lloyd and the Little Elvers continued to make progress on our latest group artwork and we all also spent lots of time outside in the lovely weather. We visited forest school, the wildlife garden, ran across the field and played on the climbing equipment. We can't wait to see Ava the snake next week!  

W/C 10.03.25

This week Little Elvers were adventuring all over school and learning more about how be safe, have fun and show respect to lots of special places in our school. We took our first visit to Forest School, on the school field, and the Elvers had a wonderful time exploring rolling and sliding down the slopes, building and using our imaginations in the mud kitchen. This kind of play is a fantastic opportunity to develop our understanding of the world (the beginning of science). We also visited the school library and investigated the different kinds of books and magazines and comfy places there are there to sit with together and read. It was amazing to see how excited and engaged the children were, looking through the books together. We also visited the play equipment on the school field at the end of the week. In class we have been talking and singing about farm animals and learning about the important resources they provide us with. We are looking forward to greeting our first animal visitors next week! 

W/C 03.03.25

Our first full week in March was filled with fun in the wonderful weather. In the sunshine, we explored new games outside - we tried jumping over hurdles and with the help of Mr Bassford we tired playing with hockey sticks and balls! Lots of children decided to try these new activities, showing that at Little Elvers we love to try new things. We visited the play equipment on the school field, climbing confidently and safely and chasing each other. On Tuesday, Mrs Lloyd made everyone their own delicious pancake to try, thank you Mrs Lloyd! We also shared more of your special family photos of pets and favourite animals this week. On Thursday it was World Book Day and the Little Elvers enjoyed talking about and playing in their costumes and listening to lots of stories. This week we also began a new large-scale artwork, with lots of children joining in with the early stages. There was so much learning - what an amazing week! 

W/C 24.02.25

It was wonderful to welcome the Little Elvers back to school after half term. We have begun learning about 'Animals and their Babies' and it has been fantastic to hear from the children about their favourite animals, to start sharing their photos from home and learning the special names for young animals. We are also beginning to share ideas about how we can care for the animals around us and exploring through play the important work that vets do. We were lucky enough to have beautiful weather on Tuesday and we spent the morning at the wildlife garden (on the school field), exploring and discovering wonderful things, like worms and plants beginning to grow. In our outdoor area we have been putting our wellies to good use, exploring mud and water. We have also been listening to stories about seasonal change and making plans to plant seeds, ready for spring.  

W/C 10.02.25

What a wonderful end to our half term of learning about dinosaurs! This week we have been sharing our favourite dinosaurs and dinosaur facts and talking about how we can find out even more. Every dinosaur is someone's favourite at Little Elvers and it is amazing to listen to the children explain what they have learned about each dinosaur's features, how they moved, their diets and habitats. The children worked hard together to create some trees to add to our dinosaur area for Trixie the Triceratops to eat, she is now full up after eating so many delicious leaves. Following the children's interests, we have been reading and acting out 'The Three Billy Goats Gruff' by Mara Alperin. The children have been retelling the story in play, using puppets, and trolls are once more appearing in our play, particularly outdoors.  It was lovely to welcome so many family members to Dinosaur Home Time this week, we were delighted that you could visit the classroom and look around with your Little Elvers. We hope that you all have a wonderful half term and look forward to seeing you soon. 

W/C 3.02.25

This week in Little Elvers we have been finding out about paleontologists and using wonderful new words, such as 'fossil',  'extinct' and 'expert' to talk about what we are learning about. We are becoming dinosaur experts! Plesiosaurs (sea reptiles) arrived in the classroom this week and we have been finding out about what they looked like and what they ate. Outdoors children have been exploring different ways to play in our sandpit and observing closely the welcome sight of our flowers and bulbs coming through. A fabulous triceratops artwork is underway in Little Elvers with many children joining in to build it up using papier-mache. We have also been reading and acting out one of our favourite books, 'Banana' by Ed Vere. The monkeys' problem of working out what to do when somebody else has an object you would like is something that the Little Elvers understand that links well to our rules of 'respect' and 'safe'.

W/C 27.01.25

An amazing new large dinosaur artwork, a pterosaur collage that the children worked on, has swooped into Little Elvers this week! We have been talking, playing and reading about pterosaurs (flying reptiles) as part of our dinosaurs topic. We shared the story, 'The Littlest Dinosaur's Big Adventure' by Michael Foreman and then acted it out with toys - our small world dinosaurs and pterosaurs have been busy with some wonderful imaginative play this week! Outdoors we had an exciting delivery of new sand for our large sand pit. We have done lots of talking and thinking about how to be safe and respectful in the sand pit and the children have made a good start. We have also been learning about Lunar New Year this week and how it is celebrated and the children have made some wonderful dragon paintings and masks. 

W/C 20.01.25

A painted volcano has erupted in Little Elvers this week! The children have been working together to create some wonderful artwork, linked to our dinosaur topic, that is now on our classroom wall. The children have had opportunities to explore painting with mud and sand, as well as paint, it has been a lot of fun. We have been learning about stegosaurus, finding out about their plates and thagomizers on their tails. The children have been exploring what it would be like to be a dinosaur through play and enjoyed using the word 'thagomizer'! We have also been thinking about what dinosaurs had to eat and drink and finding out that some dinosaurs were herbivores. This links to the story 'Tyrannosaurus Drip' by Julia Donaldson, which we shared this week. 

W/C: 13.01.25

This week we have continued learning about dinosaurs and what it means for things to have happened ‘in the past’. The Little Elvers enjoyed telling us about when they were babies, in the past. We talked about how different the world was when dinosaurs were living on Earth and the Little Elvers were very curious about the Tyrannosaurus Rex, how they moved, their diet and where they lived. We all shared the story ‘Rex’ by Simon James and asked some great questions about dinosaur eggs. The Little Elvers have been exploring the idea of volcanoes through play and Mrs Lloyd constructed a wonderful baking soda-volcano. We were all very excited to see it erupt! In the classroom this week we have also been sharing our important rule, ‘choose it, play it, put it away’ and showing that we can put our toys away to keep everyone safe and show respect.

W/C: 06.01.25

I am so proud of our Little Elvers! The children who started in September or prior have been such good friends to the children who were new this week! They have been kind and helped the new children understand where our toys are and how to make good choices. The children have loved exploring the frost and ice outside. This has lead to lots of brilliant questioning about ice and the weather. It has also given us the chance to make marks in the frost with large sweeping brushes, sponges and small painting brushes. We have also started our learning about dinosaurs and we excited to delve deeper into this learning next week! Well done Little Elvers!