Sesame Street: Will.i.am Sings "What I Am"

This is one of our favourite treat and inspiration songs in nursery.

I love the celebrity sesame street videos. They feature people that children recognise, people that are famous and people who are important in culture. To see these people take the time to sing songs and present information that is designed for very young children is wonderful because it sends a message that all young people need to hear: "you matter".

Sesame Street: Bruno Mars: Don't Give Up

A favourite treat and inspiration song.

I love the celebrity sesame street videos. They feature people that children recognise, people that are famous and people who are important in culture. To see these people take the time to sing songs and present information that is designed for very young children is wonderful because it sends a message that all young people need to hear: "you matter".

Sesame Street: Usher's ABC Song

We use this as a "get up and go" phonics starter. The children love it and are already getting really good at listening to the words and doing the actions.

I love the celebrity sesame street videos. They feature people that children recognise, people that are famous and people who are important in culture. To see these people take the time to sing songs and present information that is designed for very young children is wonderful because it sends a message that all young people need to hear: "you matter".

Sesame Street: Cobie Smulders shows Grover how to be Courteous

Used as a carpet introduction for a circle time and focus of the week towards PSED development. A kind mind is a fine mind!

I love the celebrity sesame street videos. They feature people that children recognise, people that are famous and people who are important in culture. To see these people take the time to sing songs and present information that is designed for very young children is wonderful because it sends a message that all young people need to hear: "you matter".

Sesame Street: Henry Cavill & Elmo teach Respect to the Big Bad Wolf

A discussion starting point for PSED development and skills. A kind mind is a fine mind!

I love the celebrity sesame street videos. They feature people that children recognise, people that are famous and people who are important in culture. To see these people take the time to sing songs and present information that is designed for very young children is wonderful because it sends a message that all young people need to hear: "you matter".

What have we been getting up to this week? and turning apps into assessment tools

It's Eid at the weekend, Eid Mubarak! In order to celebrate Eid and share this happy time with our families, we have been busy making Eid cards. I decided to use a very simple card template at this stage in the year. We painted the palms of our hands gold and bronze, and mixed a beautiful emerald green for the fingers that looked like the beautiful colour you see on the roofs of Mosques. We printed these onto white paper and attached them to rainbow cards reminiscent of the beautiful colourful clothes that people wear to celebrate Eid.

Next week we are having an Eid party so I look forward to seeing the children have a wonderful time in their rainbow colours. It's one of my favourite times of year.

Something else I love about this time of year is the smell of the changing seasons. Although it's now dark when I get up for work (and getting up in the dark does make waking up early a chore!) the smell of the air when I step outside, more than makes up for it. There's a wonderful stillness when it's dawn and being able to be part of that is very calming and beautiful if you take a moment to breathe it in before you begin your busy day.

Nursery decided to go for a walk in the park and as luck would have it we picked the sunniest day of the week. It was still cold and we zipped our coats up (a good job, as it started to rain just as we set off back to school!) and set off together to the park on our first walk of the year. We are lucky to have a nice big park just a few streets away and took a few bags with us to collect some nice Autumny things to use back in the nursery. The iPads really proved their worth as photos and notes could be quickly snapped, ready to upload straight to Tapestry without requiring you to take your eyes off the group. We collected so many conkers, oak branches and beautiful leaves that we were able to make some leaf prints straight away and save some for focused work next week!

I was wary of the leaves turning damp and unpleasant in the plastic bags so have transferred them to a wire basket and strung a garland of the most colourful across the nursery to dry out and bring the Autumn indoors to us.

I love to find new uses for things, and try to think outside the box when it comes to my classroom. The app store told me that the post-it app was app of the week, so I downloaded it, as I usually do, to test it out. This app is AMAZING. It allows you to snap a photo of a group of post-its and reorganise them on your device. Obviously this is incredibly useful for those meetings where you end up with lots of post it's on the wall (surely i'm not the only one where this is seemingly all my meetings?) After clapping my hands in joy, my first thought was to things other than post-its, naturally. It occurred to me to lay out the children's Eid cards on the floor and snap a photo of them from above to see if it would recognise the inside portion of the card as a post-it. It did. Now all those first signatures are stored on my ipad in evernote, which the post-it app neatly allowed me to export the now organised signature-turned-writing samples to, I plan to use this method to collect samples and turn them into class writing sample boards which I can store in evernote as a progress scrapbook, this will give me a massive amount of qualitative data, but add only minutes to my assessment timeframe. Truly amazing.

Fine Art Fridays!

Over the summer I was discussing the EYFS with one of my best friends, whose daughter had just left nursery to move onto reception in the september. My friend is a talented artist, and the value she places on imagination and expressing emotion through artistic media has had a notably positive influence on her little girl.

It got me thinking about the way the EYFS nurtures creativity and imagination, which in my humble opinion is one of it's finest features, but I also thought about the way we study art in school. It may sound odd to say but thinking of my own school experience art was often studied in a very "childish" way. That is to say, it wasn't taken as seriously as the other subjects (Science, I'm talking about Science) Now, I love Science. I took four science subjects at A-level myself and my degree is a Science degree. That said, I don't believe that knowledge, and feeling and progress can, or even should, be split so neatly as they were in the curriculum I studied. Art is a way of expressing your thoughts and ideas, just as writing is. So why are we so concerned about improving a child's verbal or written literacy, and not their creative or kinetic literacy?

One of the ways I hope to counter this in nursery this year is by keeping in my mind the mnemonic "fine art fridays" whereby I aim to talk to the children regularly about art, music, and expression beyond the classroom. To show that this way of expressing your ideas is just as valid and just as worthy of esteem as thoughtful writing.

The first piece we are going to consider is "The Snail" by Matisse. If you aren't familiar with the piece, it's bright, beautiful and simple to create inspired by works for younger children. Matisse captures the essence of the snail without necessarily trying to replicate it's image, we all know what snails look like after all, their appearance doesn't  transmit new knowledge to us, but Matisse's interpretation does give us new information, new learning. It tells us what he thinks is important about the snail, and how he is feeling at that moment. Without words, without handwriting or even holding a pencil, Matisse demonstrates what I feel is an excellent example of what I mean when I say kinetic literacy.

From www.tate.org.uk

Beyond this, "The Snail" is worth (according to my quick google search) about $25 million. I'm keen to show the children that art is about more than making a drawing that looks exactly like something that "is", that creating is worthwhile.