Sunflowers and Gardening!

Over the last couple of weeks, the preschool children have been observing the changes of trees and plants in the garden, which have rapidly grown as we welcome the warmer weather. The children have had the opportunity to plant their own sunflower seed pots to take home as well as planting some in preschool, which they have been very eager to see develop each day. After the long Easter weekend, there was good progress on the growth of the sunflowers which many children noticed as they came in to nursery and were eager to show their friends. These sunflowers will be planted in the new herb development area in the nursery garden when they are ready to be transferred and the children will be testing their maths skills and doing weekly measurements of the stalks. The children have been eager to water the vegetable and herb gardens daily and are very pleased to see lots of growth within the vegetable patches which has triggered lots of investigations and conversations as to where and how many fruits and vegetables are grown. 

The children have also been very excited to welcome the hatching of the butterflies from their cocoons this week and will be getting ready to release them in to nature at the beginning of next week. The children have been doing daily counts of butterflies each morning as they come in to nursery with a small group of children quickly noticing that there had been 3 butterflies hatch over just one night. The children have been looking in to life cycles of tadpoles to frogs and ducklings to ducks as they await eagerly for the arrival of the duckling eggs next week. 

The children have also been challenging their fine and gross motor skills by taking part in large and small scale threading activities. Many children were able to find the first letter of their name amongst the alphabet threading boards whilst others going going on the large scale threading board in the garden. The children worked together to pull the string through all of the holes and admired their group work once they were finished.