Squirrels News - February 11th 2022
This week our topic book was Real Superheroes by Julia Seal. The children have loved exploring this book and developing the idea that we can all be real life superheroes in our actions and how we help others.
The children have identified some superhero jobs they want to do when they grow up such as being a police officer or a rubbish collector to keep people safe and make sure our world is clean.
We have also thought about the ways that we can be superheroes already by being kind and caring to each other. In our role play area we have had a setup of some of the amazing superhero jobs ranging from doctors to builders which the children have thoroughly enjoyed dressing up as and re-enacting.
To extend our imagination further, we have explored real life superheroes in other areas of the classroom through small world activities such as the fire station and home setup.
Our learning took an unexpected turn this week after a child brought in a fossil for show and tell. They explained that the fossil had come from a volcano! This sparked an interesting discussion about where volcanoes exist and how they form. Once child also asked whether it is too dangerous to climb certain volcanoes.
We took this opportunity to introduce a new word and superhero to the children, a geologist! We learned that geologists are people who monitor tectonic plates to try and determine if a volcano is dormant or active. As the children were so keen to discuss this and find out more, we decided to explore chemical reactions in Science and demonstrated how tectonic plates work during a science experiment. Everyone was fascinated!
On our Outdoor Learning Day this week we kept our eyes peeled for real life superheroes. We searched around our local area to see what superhero jobs we could see people doing. To everyone’s excitement we managed to spot lots of superheroes including a postal worker, bus driver, shop worker, delivery driver, rubbish collector and electrical engineer!
We were overjoyed when some of these people stopped to say hello and to tell us about their jobs.
When we arrived at the common, we wanted to try being superheroes. We discussed what tasks we could do and decided to became rubbish collectors so that we could help clear up the litter and keep us and the animals safe.
Whilst looking for rubbish we found something that looked a bit strange and learnt that it was in fact the roots of a tree. We learnt what roots are, how they help trees and why they are important.
Later in the morning we created story stones to help us make our own story about real life superheroes. We used this as an opportunity to added in some numeracy and develop our maths skills by thinking about how many of each character we needed in our story.
The children are becoming great at thinking of different characters, names and events and it is wonderful to see how their skills have developed over the few weeks that we have been doing this exercise.