red, orange, yellow, brown

Our children have been getting into the autumn spirit recently by exploring giant autumnal sensory bins, collecting, painting and printing with fallen leaves and using them to make sticky wreath pictures too.

The various loose autumnal parts have intrigued our children and they have focused well taking their time to observe closely, share their thoughts, discuss their personal experiences and then play with the loose parts in their own self-chosen exploratory ways.

Our skilled practitioners used these play opportunities to extend communication and language for our children and they introduced new words and scaffolded conversations and helped them all describe their observations and experiences.

Quite simply autumn creates awe and wonder and this translates beautifully into imaginative, creative, collaborative, exciting play! xxxx

Sometimes you’ve just got to stop and give your bestie a quick squeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzeeeee!!!

Friendship is such an important part of nursery life and our children create such strong bonds throughout their nursery lives and these make their days transform from good ones into AMAZING ones!!

There’s always a warm Jolly welcome for all our fabulous friends here at nursery xxxx

Whether inside or out conker rolling has simply been all the rage at Jollies!!

Inside masterpieces were created by tilting a tray up and down, forwards and backwards and left and right and as the conkers rolled amazing marks were made…

Outside, on a HUGER scale, conkers were rolled down drainpipes and they splattered and splashed and rolled quickly and slowly as they made their marks in the paint!

The conclusion? We’re definitely still bonkers about conkers!!!!! xxxx

Our lovely photographer, Kelly, has been here taking weekend family photo shoots and once she’s changed the background ready for the individual photos taking place today we have snaffled it and made use of the background that she’s discarded…

It has been placed over furniture to create a ‘den’, but not just any old den… it’s a mark-making extravaganza of a den!!

Our children are reaching and stretching and using their hand/eye coordination to create some marvellous marks… engaging both their physical and creative skills as they explore and experiment. xxxx

Is what our environments here at Jollies are designed to facilitate… we want our children to be inspired and follow their interests and set their learning journeys off in their own self-chosen wonderful directions!

Throughout the day they are invited to participate in adult-led activities with a specific learning intention too, but we also always want to support their exploration and discovery in an independent way too.

It is in these spaces that adults observe closely and then sensitively intervene to scaffold, support and extend their play, but as far as our children are concerned they are just having a brilliant time playing!! (They can leave the rest of the other stuff to their Jolly grown ups who are always observing, evaluating, assessing and thinking about planning for their future learning and progression).

Whoop whoop to Early Years play xxxx

Exploring Elephants have been exploring their senses recently when Jade set up an invitation to play and investigate with lots of sensory toys/resources on offer.

She brought in fidget toys and noisy tubes for sight, touch and sound. There was a diffuser to stimulate the children’s senses of both smell and sight; as it filled the room with gorgeous vanilla scents, but they could also watch the colours changing.

Then to get those tastebuds working she cut up some orange, kiwi and cucumber slices so they could all have their own slices to taste.

The children were so excited by this activity and they loved investigating all aspects of this sensory play. We saw their interests piqued and their curiosity grow as they got stuck straight in and explored all the sensory toys/resources.

The fidget poppers frequently seemed to be a firm favourite amongst our little ones as they spent quite some time very focused popping each individual one!

They also all loved to taste the fruit and vegetable slices and it was interesting to listen to their comments as they really focused closely and tried to put into words exactly what it was that they were tasting!

Their senses were truly stimulated and this led to a high sense of well-being too as they explored and investigated with focus, confidence, excitement and such enthusiasm xxxx

After all the necessary risk assessments had been carried out, and under close supervision and guidance, our children showed that they were totally bonkers about conkers!

Lots of scooping and transferring of conkers was observed as our children created their own self-set challenges… mostly involving filling ALL the holes on the wooden boards. This naturally lent itself to some wonderful language sharing as vocabulary was introduced such as empty, full, more, less, discussion of sizes and lots of counting too! Xxxx

This little one adored exploring the Autumn tray recently. He absolutely loved this!! Whilst playing with Emma he learned the difference between conkers, acorns and pine cones and they used lots of autumnal vocabulary linked to what they could see….. Naming certain things took a while initially for him to get his head around, but later as he picked objects up and rearranged them and explored them he soon started to naturally name them too within his conversations…

The best bit though?! Was combining Iron Man with the Autumn tray too… suddenly the leaves became a soft bed for him to climb into to keep himself warm on this chilling autumnal evening… and it was then no longer a tray full of autumn it was the perfect home for a superhero… or two!!

At Jollies the play possibilities are endless and they simply know no bounds; as the only limit to creating imaginary play scenarios is our children’s imaginations!! xxxx

After setting himself a challenge with the 3D stacking shapes and carefully selecting and placing them and persevering (and rearranging!) until he’d achieved his desired result it was simply wonderful to see the look of total satisfaction as his 3D model was finally completed! xxxx

Fiona and her children explored the possibilities of a cardboard box and their wish was her command!! xxxx