This week, for our Understanding the World focus, Nursery have been learning about space. The children were read the story ‘Aliens love underpants’ by Claire Freedman and Ben Cort.

In the small world area the children had a space area to explore with rockets, planets, astronauts and more. The allowed the children to development their new vocabulary of space. All the children loved this new area. They enjoyed making rocket noises and saying what they thought the astronauts would say to each other in space.

"Look at planet Earth" -Matilda

"Remember the space boots" -Derren

"Zoom" -Finley

 In Maths, to develop the children's knowledge of shape, we recapped as a class our shapes and what we know about them.

Circle- "it roll" -Freddie

Square- "4 sides the same" -Erica

Rectangle- "2 longer sides, 2 shorter sides" -Matilda

Triangle- "pointy" -Rosalie

After the children in small group were asked to create their own rockets using the shapes they know to make something else. The children loved explored exploring the different shapes  and creating their rockets. They were asked to name the shapes they used and how many they used for each. This was lovely way to see what shapes the children knew and what they could say about the shapes.

The children had a counting activity to count the bear astronauts to board the rocket before it takes off. We started from 1 bear and re counted all the way to 5! They were fabulous at one to one correspondence too (one touch is one number).


For our Expressive Arts & Design we shared a new Art skill of marble painting to create our own planets. The children named the colours they wanted to use which supported their colour recognition. They were shown a demonstration of how to create the pattern and the children were left independently to create their own. After they added some extra details and their own astronaut that landed on their planet. As a class, they have their own class rocket which all the children painted their own idea on and it looks fantastic! 



In the construction area the children had to create their own rocket with the bricks. This allowed children to explore the shapes and use their imagination to design their own rocket. 

In the fine motor skill area the children had to use the play dough and tools to create stars for the sky. They really really play dough activities to get their fingers moving whilst having fun!

In the sand area the children had the match the number stars to the space rocks and fill the inside of them will sand when counting. They children also had the equipment to create the effect on the moon, planets and space rocks too!

In the maths area the children had to weigh different space rocks, to see which one is heavier and lighter. After the children could unwrap the space rock to see what is inside, they enjoyed this activity as they wanted to see what was inside each space rock.