Archive 2020-21

This week squirrel's class has been 'Going on a Bear Hunt'.  We have retold the story using musical instruments and actions.  

We had lots of fun hiding bears then made treasure maps and used positional language to describe where they were hidden and have travelled over and under the play equipment.  We have also continued to observe our caterpillars. After munching their way through the food, they made their way to the top of the tub where they began to spin their silk, eventually shedding their skin to reveal the chrysalis.  It won't be long now until the butterflies emerge!

The highlight of our week was Sports Day.  Lots of fun was had by all.

This week, we have enjoyed hunting for minibeasts around our wildlife area.  We have read lots of stories and learnt action songs about minibeasts too.  Maybe you could sing them together at home.  Our caterpillars have been getting bigger and have started to make their way towards the top of their container.  We are wondering whether they might start to spin their cocoon soon.  We've started practising for Sports Day and had fun celebrating Sports Week on the bouncy castle and soft play equipment.

This week, Squirrels class read the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.   We learnt to play the Snail Race game, retold the story of The Hungry Caterpillar using small world resources and made cards.  We have also continued to observe the chicks as they grow. We are really interested in learning about insects and had a lovely time dressing up and pretending to be minibeasts during 'play and learn'.

We had some exciting visitors this week!  Squirrel's class has watched in awe as the ten eggs in our incubator hatched into ten tiny chicks.  We have looked at the lifecycle of a chicken and we learnt that just like us, chicks need food, water and care.  We were so impressed with how respectfully the children have watched the chickens hatch.

We have been reading the story Handa's Surprise.  We enjoyed looking at some of the fruits from the story, feeling them, smelling them and describing them.  We learnt that we need to eat lots of fruit and vegetables to stay healthy and the children asked if we could make fruit salad. Their cutting skills were very impressive.  We hope you enjoyed eating your fruit salads at home. 

The children have been having lots of fun during 'play and learn' in our role play pizza restaurant and we've had lots of requests to make pizza.  We played the game 'shopping list' and made a shopping list of our own, with all the ingredients we needed.  Did you enjoy eating your pizzas at home?  We also had lots of fun playing on the giant drums in music!

We have had a fun couple of weeks learning about worms and observing them in our new wormery.  The children enjoyed digging for the worms and carefully layered soil and sand into our wormery.  We made our own mud, using cocoa powder and water and enjoyed exploring the changes in texture as we made it.  We also made long and short worms, using playdough and produced some beautiful symmetrical string art. 

This week we have been thinking about pets.  We watched a video about a trip to the vets and set up a vet role play  with the children, so that they could extend their pretend play.   We used the maths counters to compare two groups, saying when they were the same or when one group had ‘more than’, or ‘fewer than' the other.  We also had fun making a collage where we joined different materials and explored different textures.

This week we read the story 'So Much' and talked about our own families. We counted how many people are in our families and talked about how there are many different families.  The children had fun washing babies in the water tray and looking after babies in our baby clinic.  They used compare bears to continue repeating patterns and had a go at making their own patterns.  We also talked about what babies can do, how they have changed, and what they can do now.  We've also been singing Baby Shark (do, do, do, do, do, do).

This week we read the Jula Donaldson story 'The Smeds and The Smoos'.  We explored colour mixing using powder and water paints to explore the colours we can make using red, blue and yellow.  We also talked positively about different appearances, hair types, eye colour and skin tones and the children looked closely at themselves in the mirror to draw self portraits.  We watched video clips of a child talking about what his family do during Ramadan and why it is important to Muslims.   

This week we have continued to focus on nursery rhymes in Squirrel's class.  Before they learn phonics, children need to be repeatedly exposed to spoken language, rhythmic patterns and simple repetitive phrases - nursery rhymes are the perfect way to do this. 

We took the parachute outside and made up some fun actions for the many verses of Row, Row, Row Your Boat.  We used instruments to count a beat to the nursery rhyme Hickory, Dickory Dock and we put on our sorting hats, to sort animals into animals that you might find at Old Macdonald's farm, and animals that you might find in the zoo.  We've also been using our fingers to say the Five Little Monkeys rhyme.  We hope you enjoy our occasional day on Friday and the long weekend.