Squirrels News - 23rd September 2022

This week our topic book was All About Friends by Felicity Brooks. It is a wonderful book which talks about how we can make friends, what happens when conflict arises and the introduces the. idea that we can have different friends who enjoy doing different things and that our friends can have other friends too. It uses gentle text to explore these ideas and we discussed the text in our activities throughout the week and went about our days thinking about how we interact with our peers.

We also used the book to discuss kind and unkind actions friends can do and why the kind option was the preferable option. In other focus lessons we practised our writing skills and recognising quantity and in around the classroom we used magnetic fishing rods to fish for and recognise numbers!

In Free Play the children enjoyed practising their life skills and independence by using the dressing frames to do up and undo zips and buttons. This is part of our focus on preparing the children for primary school and developing their own ability to care for themselves.

We had a wonderful time serving our friends in the role play cafe and we used the images and books laid out to discuss healthy and unhealthy food. Outside we used the tools to 'fix broken' areas in the Outside Learning Environment, looked at capacity using water with various shaped containers and made wonderful meals using sand and natural objects.

For our Outdoor Learning Day we focused on getting messy as we had noticed some of the children did not want to get their hands dirty so we decided to make autumn leaf angels, rub our hands in the mud and then make delicious mud cakes!

It’s been a brilliant week and it’s been amazing to watch the continued development of the children’s independence, self care skills and emotional development both indoors and outside the classroom.