Squirrels News - 13th January 2023
It has been lovely to welcome the Squirrels back to the Nursery this week and to hear all about their Christmas holidays. There was particular excitement over the food they had eaten!
To welcome the children back we had set up a train station in the Role Play area which was a big hit with all the children, many of whom decided to dress up and pretend they were different characters on the train. Unfortunately the train kept breaking down and catching fire! As you can imagine some of the passengers were not very happy at having to wait so long at the station for the train to be fixed.
Outside we had a lot of fun exploring in the sand looking for letters which we could then match to objects as well as using our imagination and creativity to build sand castles. We also developed our balancing skills and practiced throwing and catching.
Our topic book of the week has been Speak Up by Miranda Paul. This book encourages us to use our voices and speak up. The book introduces how we can use our voices in a variety of scenarios such as when we need help, support, on behalf of someone else, if something needs changing etc.
We touched on the work of the suffragettes when thinking about old rules or laws which may need changing. The suffragettes were introduced by discussing the idea that we vote in class for our role play area set up. I explained to the children that in the past women were not allowed to vote which amongst other things led to the suffragette movement. It was a great discussion with one of the children declaring afterwards "we can vote now because we do!"
For our Art and Literacy project this week we focused on things we could speak up about such as caring for the environment. We discussed our ideas as a group before individually writing down a sentence in a speech bubble about and creating a side profile of our faces to look like we were speaking up to each other.
During Maths we began to look at subtraction and the symbols which make up a subtraction number sentence. In Spanish we focused on learning colours alongside words to explain our emotions.
We were excited to choose the songs we wanted to sing in Music and continued to develop our balancing skills in Sport. To finish the week we went out for our first Outdoor Learning Day of the new year where we created a shelter using tarp, some string and carabiner clips. We used our problem solving skills to decide how to create the shelter and we are definitely developing our resilience and survival skills!