We have continued to welcome the change is season this month & all age groups have enjoyed Autumnal walks around our local area & park, the older children in particular enjoyed jumping in the bundles of leaves & listening to them crunch!

Our youngest children, Blue Monkeys have been exploring music & movement thus supporting their expressive arts & design development. Our bouncing babies have enjoyed having their very own disco where our eldest Blue Monkeys have learnt some new dance movements, whilst our youngest have enjoyed beginning to move to music & the sensory experience of the lights around the room from the disco ball. They have also enjoyed exploring musical instruments & the different sounds they can make.

Pink Monkeys this month have thoroughly enjoyed bringing their imaginations & experiences to life through various role play activities. Transport is a strong interest for our little ones & with the support of their carers a town was created for them to explore. We used tape to map out the roads, built wooden block buildings, blue materials were used to create the sea where sea creatures were also placed & we used balance beams to build our boat & boarded a train using our tickets! Alongside this the children loved to dress-up & role play as Fire Officers, Princesses & Doctors.

Our youngest children in our Pre-School, Red Monkeys have been exploring different textures such as; paint, cornflour, playdough, spaghetti, sand & leaves by dipping in their hands & feet. This sparked many conversations encouraging the children to describe what each felt like & observed colour changes when mixing paint. They continued their messy creativeness & extended this on to healthy eating by exploring fresh fruit & vegetables to print patterns. Our eldest Red Monkeys have been building upon their language & literacy skills by identifying & matching rhyming words through games & singing songs with picture props displayed on the rhymes board. They have also been working out simple number sums aided by stamps, using their fingers to add & subtract & were able to write & record their sums & answers.

Things we celebrated this month; International Day was a huge success & every age group was provided with amazing play experiences which encouraged them to discover about the world around them, celebrating where they are from & their peers. The children listened to music from all over, explored maps & soft globes with interest, tasted different foods & travelled to different parts of the world using their very own passports. Diwali presented our children with the opportunity to celebrate the Hindu festival of lights through Rangoli Patterns & colour exploration, creating tea light holders & lighting the candles, reading the story, cake baking & face painting.

We finished the month with a week long Halloween celebration which enabled all children to join in. This meant the nursery was decorated inside & out with hanging cobwebs & spiders, monsters & skeletons, pumpkins & enter if you dare tape. Throughout this week the children delved into a variety of creepy activities, tasted the spooky menu, created their own decorations, explored spooky sounds, carved pumpkins & made potions. The week concluded with a fancy-dress party & all staff & children looked fantastic!