City of London School Highlights - 24 May 2025

🐣 Hatchlings Weekly Newsletter

📍 City of London Nursery
🗓️ This Week’s Highlights: Music, Movement & Mini Adventures!

From sensory art to sunflower buzzing, tea-making to toddler yoga—our littlest learners had a week full of wonder, creativity, and cultural fun!

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Come experience our nurturing, multicultural nursery where babies and toddlers (6–36 months) learn, grow, and explore the world with joy.

🌿 Amazing Excursion: A Stroll to St Paul’s Gardens

We stepped out into the sunshine for a peaceful walk to St Paul’s Cathedral garden. The babies enjoyed walking on the soft grass, pointing at birds, and feeling the breeze on their faces. It was the perfect blend of sensory play, exploration, and fresh air.

Regional Activities: Exploring Indian Traditions

To celebrate our India cultural theme, the Hatchlings engaged in two beautiful, sensory-rich activities:

🎨 Rangoli-Inspired Sand Play
Using colourful sand in trays, the children scooped, swirled, and poured with delight, mimicking the vibrant patterns of traditional Rangoli art while strengthening fine motor skills.

🖍️ Henna Hand Art
The little ones used crayons to colour intricate henna patterns on paper hands, developing control and focus while connecting with global traditions through creativity.

🐝 Festival Fun: International Bee Day Buzz

To celebrate World Bee Day, our Hatchlings created buzzing sensory magic using soft tissue paper and bright sunflower props. We explored the colour yellow, waved our “bee wings,” and sang Hickory Dickory Bumblebee—a cheerful ode to our pollinating friends!

🍊 International Tea Day: A Sensory Celebration

We introduced our babies to the sights, smells, and textures of tea-making! They gently explored:

🍊 Orange slices

🌿 Cinnamon sticks

🥄 “Milk” and “sugar” mixing

🍵 Fruity herbal tea ingredients

Every stir, sniff, and pour was a hands-on moment of curiosity and delight.

🍌 Sensory Play: Emotions Through Food

In our edible sensory play, we introduced emotions like happy and sad using texture and taste. Babies squished soft yogurt, touched cool fruit slices, and began understanding feelings through touch, expression, and social play.

🎶 Specialist Teaching: Music, Movement & More!

🚒 Miss Molly’s Musical Morning
This week’s musical circle time featured favourites like Miss Polly Had a Dolly and The Fire Truck Song. Our Hatchlings shook rattles, followed directions, and clapped along joyfully.

🚀 Lucy Sparkles Music Session
We zoomed off to space with “Zoom Zoom Zoom, We’re Going to the Moon!” The children loved launching pretend rocket ships, moving their bodies to the beat, and singing in unison. Energy, joy, and rhythm filled the room!

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We’re proud of our Hatchlings for another joyful, sensory-filled week of growth. Thank you for joining us on this journey of discovery!

🐉 City of London – Blue Dragon Newsletter

📅 This Month’s Theme: Diwali, Discovery & Dynamic Play!

Our Blue Dragons have had an inspiring week filled with cultural celebration, movement mastery, and multi-sensory learning. From crafting Rangoli to chasing imaginary sharks, their minds, bodies, and vocabularies are all lighting up—just like Diwali itself!

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🌏 Regional Education: Celebrating Diwali & Southeast Asian Traditions

This month, we’re immersing ourselves in the beauty and meaning of Diwali – the Festival of Lights. The children have been learning about:

✨ Lighting diyas (lamps)

🎨 Creating Rangoli designs

🍛 Exploring festive foods and family traditions

🎨 Sensory Rangoli Art with Coloured Rice & Pasta

Using vibrant coloured rice and pasta, our Blue Dragons created beautiful Rangoli patterns in their tuff tray. This hands-on art session supported:

✔️ Fine motor skills through picking, pouring, and patterning
✔️ Visual creativity with bright colours and shapes
✔️ Cultural awareness by exploring Indian decoration traditions

🈶 Modern Languages: Mandarin Meets Texture

To expand our cultural learning, we introduced the Mandarin word for texture: 质地 (zhídì).

Children explored materials like:

🌾 Rice

🫘 Lentils

🧵 Silk fabrics

🎨 Coloured pasta

As they built their Rangoli designs, they practiced saying “质地 (zhídì)” and described each texture—smooth, bumpy, rough, soft—in Mandarin!

💬 This multi-sensory learning blended:

Language development (English & Mandarin)

Cultural understanding

Tactile exploration

We’re so proud to see the children confidently using new vocabulary and connecting with cultures beyond their own.

📘 Explore more about our international curriculum and language-rich learning

🚒 Specialist Teaching: Movement with Miss Molly

This week’s session was full of adventure and mindfulness!

👩‍🚒 Firefighter Role Play:
Dressed as brave firefighters, the children raced around “putting out fires,” practicing teamwork, spatial awareness, and coordination.

✨ Relaxation Under the Stars:
After the excitement, we transitioned to calm breathing beneath sensory star lights—helping children learn to self-regulate and find peace in their bodies and minds.

🏃‍♂️ Sporty Minis: Movement, Confidence & Imagination!

🧘‍♂️ Warm-Up Fun:
We started with stretches and leg shakes to energize the body.

🌀 Agility Practice:
The children practiced balance and coordination by jumping over ladders and into hoops, with plenty of giggles along the way!

🦈 Shark Chase Game:
To finish, we played an exciting game of “Shark Chase”—children ran, dodged, and escaped imaginary sharks, building confidence, speed, and teamwork.

💪 Learn more about our specialist movement and sports programmes here »

💬 Want to Learn More?

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We’re so proud of our Blue Dragons for embracing new traditions, languages, and challenges with confidence and joy. Here's to another week of wonder

🐉 Dragon Flight Preschool Newsletter

A Week of Learning, Culture, and Movement
City of London Nursery – Preschool Group Highlights

This week, our Dragon Flight Preschoolers dove into a thoughtfully curated mix of activities, combining early literacy, mathematics, cultural experiences, physical development, and emotional literacy—all in one vibrant, play-based journey!

🔷 Mathematics in Motion: Exploring 2D Shapes

Our little mathematicians explored the world of 2D shapes through interactive play. Using shape-sorting games, stencils, and matching tasks, children confidently identified circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles.

Educators introduced vocabulary like “sides,” “corners,” and “round,” and it was a joy to hear children using these words in peer conversations. This active, hands-on session nurtured focus, vocabulary, and early reasoning skills.

🫓 Cultural Cooking: Making Chapati

As part of our monthly India cultural theme, children got hands-on with a chapati-making activity. They mixed and rolled dough, observed textures, and smelled warming ingredients—all while practicing turn-taking and following instructions.

This session offered:

Fine motor development through kneading and rolling

Cultural appreciation through traditional foods

Language enrichment with cooking terms and group conversation

The excitement was contagious—and so was the delicious scent of warm chapatis!

🐘 Learning with Specialist Teachers: Sports & Imagination

This week’s sports session turned into a jungle adventure! The children roared like tigers, swung like monkeys, and stomped like elephants, combining imaginative role-play with gross motor development.

Later, hula hoops became “cars” in a traffic light game, helping children:

Practice spatial awareness

Respond to movement cues (“green = go!”)

Build cooperation and self-regulation

Every move was filled with giggles and learning!

👉 Want to learn more about our specialist teaching programme?

🧘 Mindfulness & Emotions with Miss Molly

Our journey through emotional literacy continued with Miss Molly’s yoga and mindfulness session. Children practiced themed poses like:

🧊 Melting Ice Cube – representing sadness

🏔️ Strong Mountain – embodying confidence

Through movement and calm breathing, they explored body-based feelings and opened up conversations about their emotional world.

Afterward, stories and role-play deepened their understanding, helping them build emotional vocabulary, empathy, and expressive confidence.

🔠 Building Literacy: Letter Tracing & Phonics

In a focused literacy session, children practiced tracing uppercase and lowercase letters using:

✋ Sandpaper letters

✍️ Dry-erase boards

🅰️ Laminated cards

Educators guided them through proper pencil grip, phonetic awareness, and name recognition, boosting both fine motor control and early writing pride.

📍 Learn More & Stay Connected

📌 City of London Bilingual Nursery
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🔗 Explore All Our Nursery Locations in London »

Each activity this week helped our preschoolers grow as learners, friends, and explorers. We’re so proud of their confidence, curiosity, and creativity!

Warm wishes,
The Hatching Dragons Team