Recently, we have had some very special snacks to celebrate Pancake Tuesday and also the Lunar New Year. 

On Pancake Tuesday, we all made our very own pancakes by mixing flour, eggs and milk and using a mixer to blend the ingredients together. We then took a ladle full of the mixture onto our griddle. We watched for the pancakes to bubble and then flipped them over. We then enjoyed our pancakes with strawberries. 

We also like to learn about global celebrations. We decided to learn about the Lunar New Year with some different snack items. We had fried rice, noodles, curry sauce, sweet and sour sauce and prawn crackers. We had the hallway decorated for the year of the horse. We played some games related to the New Year and also read the story of 'The Great Race' to find out how the years were named after the order the animals finished in the race.

In class, we made Christmas tree decorations from twigs we had gathered during a trip to our school forest. We had lots of cosy fun too, with a pyjamas and movie day, where we watched 'The Snowman' and enjoyed a hot chocolate. We had a wonderful Christmas dinner too and wore our Christmas jumpers, we even had an extra special visitor, Santa! On our last day, we had another special visitor, Ellie the Elf came to tell us a story about looking after our community and the importance of keeping our streets clean.

Christmas is a magical time of year for our nursery children and we have loved spending this special time learning together. 

The farm trail was so festive, we got to see the area where the Christmas trees grow, walk by the chickens and pigs and then we reached the barn. In the barn, we got to pet the rabbits and guinea pigs before getting a chance to feed the goats. We also had the important job of choosing a Christmas tree. We even got to see them put it through the tree netting machine!

The soft play was also really fun, with lots of space to run around, slide, play football and basketball and it even had a disco!

We loved our trip to the Christmas tree farm. It really got us in the Christmas mood!

We have been chosen to be a part of this very exciting project over the next few years. We are building strong and positive relationships with our partner school, Holy Child Nursery School. We have been supported by parents from both schools and staff members. These visits have provided wonderful opportunities for children, staff, and families to connect, and our school communities are developing excellent links that will continue to grow. 

Our first visit was here, at Harmony, where the children joined together in a visit to the forest school, where we went on a Bear Hunt! We also had fun together in the classrooms.

One very exciting thing in our outdoor play space is our mud area. Here we have a mud kitchen, digging pits, a big hill to climb and a place to grow our own food. We have really enjoyed making the most of the Autumn harvest in nursery this year and have used the foods growing here to make something new and delicious!

In September, we picked the apples from our apple trees. We decided to use these to make an apple crumble. Together, we prepared the crumble, first by chopping up the apples. We then made a crumble topping by rubbing butter into a mixture of flour and sugar. This isn't just fun but a really good way for us to develop our fine motor skills. We baked our crumble and had it for snack the next day (with some custard too!) and it was so tasty!

We also enjoyed making some more tasty delights with our garden produce. In October, we harvested some onions from our vegetable patch. This time, we decided that we wanted to share our food with others. We cut the onions up, with a just a few tears from Mrs Montgomery! We then added them in a pot to cook, along with some brown sugar, vinegar and balsamic vinegar. They stewed and the whole nursery smelled amazing!

We packed up the chutney into small containers and sent them off in the Harvest Hampers to members of our local community. We shared photographs of some of people enjoying their chutney for their lunch and talked about how we can make other people feel loved with our kindness.