Kits News - 21st October 2022

This week we have been learning about Diwali ‘The Festival of Lights’. We chose the topic book Peppa Pig’s Diwali and through the story we learnt about how the celebration includes fireworks, giving presents and decorations such as Divas and Rangolis.

We continued our Diwali celebrations throughout the week and During Free Play we made Divas with playdough and developed our fine motor skills as we decorated them with colourful gems.

We looked at Rangoli patterns throughout the week and explored shape as we made our own Rangolis during our Maths Focus Time. The children stuck colourful shapes onto their paper plates and we talked about the number of sides they have and what they look like.

During Art we made colourful firework paintings where the children used cut up cardboard tubes to print firework patterns onto the paper and then had great fun adding glitter on top to finish the ‘sparkly’ firework effect!

Our Role Play Area has been set up as an Indian Restaurant and we have been talking to the children about the different Indian dishes on the menu. The ‘restaurant’ contained a range of different whole spices and the children explored the smell of them as they used them to make pretend dishes for their friends.

Diwali is a festival full of colour and we celebrated this in our mark-making activity where we focused on the letter ‘S’. The children used thin paintbrushes and sticks to draw lines and circles in the colourful, glittery sand. We teach phonics to the Kits through exposure to letters in their environment and the Anima Phonics scheme. We combined our mark-making activity with the letter ‘S’ and lots of snakes so the children can start to recognise the phoneme and become familiar with the sound it makes. As well as extending the Kits marking-making and phonics skills, through this activity the children explored the texture of the sand and we talked about the different colours and the fact that it was very ‘sparkly’!