Squirrels News - 10th January 2025
In the Squirrels classroom this Half Term we will be focusing on different artists, culminating with an Art exhibition of the children's work. In honour of this our ‘Person of Interest’ this term is Andy Warhol. In preparation for the start of this project our book of the week was called 'The Dot' which tells the story of a young child who says they are no good at Art. Her teacher asks her to make a mark and then sign it. The mark she makes is a dot. Pretty soon the girl starts making small dots, big dots and multi-coloured dots and realises that everyone is an artist. The children really enjoyed this book, and we discussed some of the art pieces we will be looking at. The children then went off to create their own piece of art.
During Free Flow this week the children went fishing for letters and had a lovely time in our new ‘Office’ Role Play. The sticky notes were particularly popular! We matched numbers to objects, explored the doll’s house and got stuck in over at the DT table. Everyone loved exploring the various new dressing up costumes becoming police officers, princess and superheroes. In the Outside Learning Environment the children explored the sand, with many of the children choosing to use the sand to make Christmas cake or birthday cakes.
Despite it being -1 in our Outside Learning Environment this week everyone wrapped up nice and warm and no one said they were cold. On the way the common we had lots of interesting discussions. The children spotted a fire extinguisher and commented that we had the same one at nursery which led to us discussing why we have them and what they do. The next question was why there are signs outside some houses. We discussed the difference between renting and selling which reminded some of the children about a Bluey episode where Bandits house is sold. The next topic was the discarded Christmas trees, with questions such as who was going to collect them and concerns around because they had been cut down whether they would die. We found a Christmas tree in a pot which still had its roots and we learned that this meant that it could grow into an adult pine tree. After this we moved onto solids and liquids as we looked at the frost, ice and where it was melting. We also spoke about evaporation as the children discovered they could see their breath in the cold air. Once we got to the common it was time to take part in some more strenuous exercise other than walking as we discussed keeping warm. We observed a few runners in shorts and with no coats, but they did have some red tinges to their skin. The next conversation was how exercise keeps us warm where we spoke about our heart being a muscle which beats faster and pumps the blood around our bodies.