Kits News - January 28th 2022
The Kits have had a great week this week and have been busy discussing feelings and emotions in line with our topic book How Do You Feel? by Anthony Browne. The book introduced us to basic feelings such as ‘happy’, ‘sad’ and ‘angry’ as well as some more complex emotions and vocabulary including feelings like ‘curious’ ‘confident’ and ‘guilty’. We used the book as a platform to discuss how these emotions make us feel and times that we have experienced them.
We continued to explore emotions during Art where we used the iPad to take photos of ourselves. We looked at the pictures we had taken and reflected on our faces and spoke about the emotions we could see in them.
We also painted ‘emotion stones’ where we stuck mouths and googly eyes on to the stones to make faces and again discussed whether the stones were happy or sad and why. Conversations with the children about their emotions are incredibly important in helping to develop their personal, social and emotional development as well as their communication and language. Our stone painting activity also offered a brilliant opportunity to extend the children’s imagination as they pondered what made people happy and sad.
Many of the children agreed that “Mummy and Daddy” made them happy and a few things which could make us sad were missing Mummy and Daddy or when we hurt ourselves. During our Cookery Focus Time, we developed our spreading skills and explored different ingredients as we made ‘Rice Cake Faces’, focusing on placing the olives, cucumber and peppers in the right places to make the features on our faces. The Kits loved this activity and we were very impressed with their focus and concentration when using their fine motor skills to carefully place each ingredient onto their rice cake – and the best bit was eating our rice cakes at Snack Time afterwards!
Despite it being cold the children have loved playing in the Outdoor Learning Environment and have been very keen to develop their balancing skills on the logs. The children have been increasing in confidence when walking along the logs and are all building up to the ‘big jump’ off at the end. We have also had the tools outside and everyone has been busy using the hammers, spanners and screw drivers to fix the gate and climbing frame.
Our Role Play Area this week has been set up as a ‘Train Station’ and the Kits have been busy taking themselves on magical adventures. We set the chairs up in a row next to a painted train and the children all jumped aboard and looked out of the windows, telling me that they could see cows, sheep and horses!