Squirrels News - 15th November 2024

This week our Role Play area was transformed into a veterinary surgery and the children have absolutely loved taking care of all the animals. We had a bunny with a poorly eye, an elephant with an ouchy on his trunk and various other injuries needing care and attention. As Monday was the day of remembrance, we continued our discussion around the importance of Remembrance Day and used the vets as a way to remind the children that we should remember animals too. Elsewhere in the classroom we practised writing our names, looked at number quantities and developed our fine motor skills using pegs. In the Outside Learning Environment, the children explored dinosaurs, made pumpkin pie and developed their confidence by moving in various ways from jumping, to climbing and moving like a range of animals.

During Circle Time we had lots of discussions about our person of interest, Ian McKellen, who supports the homeless charity Crisis as well as discussing the charity Ella's which led us to think about our different wants and needs. We extended this outside of he classroom by taking a trip to TkMax where we thought about the difference between wants and needs further. The children were very good as we spotted lots of lovely things. We discussed the idea of things we need such as appropriate clothing and food alongside the things we want such as a surplus amount of toys or as adults things such as multiple handbags or crockery. We discussed giving things to charity when we no longer use them. It was a lovely little discussion, touching on the idea of helping and thinking about others. Later on in the week after this visit the children took part in a sorting activity which looked specifically at wants and needs, deciding if they needed things such as a television or medicine. 

For our Focus session in the Outdoor Learning Environment the children were absolutely engrossed in our activity. This week in class the children have enjoyed threading beads to make necklaces and bracelets, so we took this concept outside and added a little maths. The children all went off on a leaf number hunt, using number lines if they needed to. We had to find numbers 1-10 and then identify the next few teen numbers. All of the children had to complete the set of numbers, discarding any if they had duplicates. We then practised hole punching the leaves to thread and make our jewellery making sure the numbers were threaded in order. We will continue with this activity next week and it was wonderful to see the children so excited to find numbers on the leaves. When they gave me the leaves they had collected, I identified any missing ones, wrote them on a leaf and off they went to find them. It was such fun!