Alex is entering his fourth week at nursery (or “school” as he likes to say – he’s convinced he’s started school properly!) and he’s taken to it like a duck to water!  He’s going five mornings a week to Bessemer Grange – the school we hope he’ll go to from next year.

Here he is with his morning nursery classmates – can you spot him?!

The nursery post pictures occasionally which is wonderful as sometimes it can be hard to get Alex to tell us what he gets up to!   Here’s clearly been doing some exploring and bug hunting:

And building forts for dinosaurs!

But occasionally, we do get a bit of an insight into what he’s learning and doing every day – mostly in the form of new songs!  I’m loving hearing him burst into new songs, including:

• A phonics song to the tune of “Who let the dogs out?”
• A days of the week song to the “Adams Family” theme song
• A brilliant alphabet song about letters coming to tea and “Z doing all the dishes”

He’s regularly coming home with reward stickers, which generally seem to be given to him for helping with tidying up and occasionally for good counting.

On the downside, his white polo shirts are taking the brunt of the creative element of his nursery activities – coming home covered in mud and paint.  I’m losing on average one polo shirt a week – need to get some better stain remover!

More formal phonics learning is getting underway, and I have to go to a class this Friday on how to keep Alex’s “home learning diary” and some tips on guided reading.  Matt and I both glowed with pride at Alex’s very first written school feedback in his reading diary – “Alex has great letter recognition and letters/sound correspondence”.  Yay for Alex!

They’ve just started doing a sound a week, so we spent the weekend carefully selecting something for him to take in that starts with an “S”.  He settled on a photograph of his sister Sophie (after we persuaded him that he couldn’t actually take his sister to nursery) and a selection of stones!

So far he seems to be behaving himself – fingers crossed that continues!  I think Jacqui gets a slightly hyper Alex for the afternoon when she picks him up – I guess he uses up his good behaviour quota for the day in the classroom!