Squirrels News - 18th November
This week we have been thinking about listening with our aptly titled topic book Why Should I Listen? by Mike Gordon. To celebrate this topic we set up a music shop in the role play area with a range of different instruments and materials for the children to explore. We also included some contemporary sounds such as squeakers and crisp packets so that the children could explore the noises they made and experiment with how we could incorporate them into our musical pieces. We also hid a doorbell in the classroom which every so often would go off to see if the children were listening!
Our musical focus continued across our activities and in Free Play we enjoyed playing sound bingo where the children had to identify the sound they were listening to from the pictures on their bingo boards. During Art we gave the children instructions detailing what colour and items to paint to see if they were listening to the instructions. We were so proud to see how well everyone did and to observe the beautiful images that were created!
During our lessons we explored addition sentences and discovered the meaning of the plus and equals signs and in Science we learnt about our senses. The children loved smelling, tasting, touching and looking at a variety of wonderful things. This week we have also started our Christmas crafts and have been learning our lines and songs for our upcoming Christmas performance!
Outside we have been playing in the rain, using various sized containers to see how much water we could catch. We also had a lot of fun playing with the guttering and been developing our hula hooping skills.
During our Outdoor Learning Day we had gloriously mild and dry weather and as part of our focus on numbers and counting we decided to go on a community walk to count how many different vehicles we could spot.
To help measure the vehicles we created a tally chart where the Squirrels learned how to record the different numbers. It was a great success and we are so proud of how well the Squirrels are progressing with their numeracy development!