Welcome to the Ducklings Class!
Welcome to the Ducklings!
At Kingfisher Special School, children aged from two to four years old who have severe and complex needs are provided with a bespoke and personalised Early Years provision within the Ducklings Nursery setting which meets all their specific needs. We use and adapt the underlying principles of Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Development Matters in structuring our offer to ensure children’s stages of development are recognised, understood and appropriately planned for. All children within Kingfisher’s Ducklings’ provision have severe and complex additional needs and have or are undergoing assessment for, an Education, Health and Care Plan.
Children at Ducklings Nursery attend either a morning or an afternoon session.
Session times are:
- Morning: 8.45 – 11.45
- Afternoon: 12.15 – 3.15
Staff
HLTA: Kim Firth
TAs: Cath Hunter
Newsletter
I Like to Move It, Move It
This half term we have been so busy playing, making friends and enjoying lots of activities linked to our topic – I like to Move it, Move it.
We have been very fortunate this half term to have been supported by Jordan from the Manchester United Foundation Trust, who has supported some of us during our physical development sessions. We have been learning how to play a ball game called Boccia. The children have really enjoyed this session.
The MILE room as always continues to a very popular place for the children and we have seen some fantastic improvements in the children’s physical development during these sessions, such as independently climbing up the steps into the ball pool.
Some of the children have been visiting soft play on a Friday and have been very busy learning how to move themselves around the space to get to the top and then come down the slide.
In sensory art we have been very busy moving our hands, vehicles, brushes, rollers etc. in paint and other materials to make marks.
Sand and water play has also been a great way of learning new skills such as moving the sand into buckets using spades, moving water from one container to another, moving sand through our fingers etc.
In music we have been making sounds on different instruments by moving our hands in different ways.
In our parachute games session, the children enjoyed holding and feeling the wind from the parachute as it is moved slowly and quickly up and down.
We had some unexpected snow this half term and Cath (not one to miss this opportunity) nipped home in her break to get her sledge. The children absolutely loved being pulled around on this in the snow.
We celebrated Chinese New Year and the children explored some Chinese foods, listened to Chinese music and dressed up as a dragon.
Hope you all have a lovely half term break, we look forward to seeing you all after this with more exciting learning taking place with our new topic – Garden Explorers.
Signalong
At Kingfisher we use Signalong as a part of a Total Communication Approach, we are constantly using core vocabulary with the children to support their language development and then through each of our topics we introduce new signs and language, which extends their vocabulary further. We also have two “Signs of the Week” which helps maintain and extend key knowledge and skills of everyday vocabulary.
Each half term we will send home relevant Signs of the Week for our Two Year Old Provision classes via SeeSaw.
How You Can Help at Home
- Plan a trip to a local garden centre
- Get wrapped up and go for a walk enjoying the fresh air
- Visit a local park – and explore the plants, trees and flowers
- Visit a play centre such as Boomerang in Bury
- Visit Wheel for all which operates from within Alexender park in Oldham. To make a booking telephone – (0161 503 1543)
- Use a washing up bowl and add some warm water and a herb smelling soap such as mint encouraging your child to smell this whilst playing and splashing in the water
- Smell and explore some of the herbs that you have in your kitchen cupboards
- Visit a local swimming pool together
- Learn the signs of the week from our school website
- Help your child to join in with actions to familiar nursery rhymes such as ‘Incy Wincy Spider,’ ‘There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden,’ ‘Little Green Frog’ etc.
