Following Interests in Nursery - Who leads the Learning?

Date: 1st Oct 2017 @ 12:28am

In Nursery, we watch children, we listen to them - and we care about their interests. Less forward planning and more in the moment planning linked to their real life play experiences. Adults in Nursery interact and respond to children to ensure collaborative learning at their own pace is taking place. When we value their ideas and care about what they care about - the more likely we are to nuture lifelong learners. 

In Nursery we have been looking closely at spiders. The children noticed lots of webs on a very wet and windy day in the playground. The spider webs were glistening with tiny raindrops and we wondered why the spider webs didn't blow away in the wind? This sparked lots of lovely conversation. 

This fed into our planning as we made webs with glue and glitter and watched a spider spin a web on our big screen. The children pretended to be flies using big arm movements as wings and then they got trapped in a spiders sticky web - luckily no spiders came and gobbled them up!! We counted spider legs and even Miss Kelbie learnt a super fact that Spiders also have 8 EYES!! We practiced our finger counting all the way up to 8! Children voted on whether they were scared of spiders or not - are you scared?

Outdoors, we made up our own game 'Fly Catchers'... 4 children were spiders and had to catch the flies and place them in a hula hoop web. It was great fun!

Lastly, we sang lots of spider related songs - including Incy Wincy Spider and Spooky Spider. 

Ask your children about their super spider knowledge! 

Here are the lyrics to Spooky Spider:

I am a spooky spider, my name is Hairy Fred 

I do push ups in the morning, and jog around my bed! 

I have to be careful - in case i bump my head... 

Thats because i live under... 

___________ bed!!