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 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!