Squirrels News - 27th January 2023
This week our topic book has been The Dark by Lemony Snicket. This book is about a little boy called Lazlow who is afraid of the dark. However, one night his night light goes out and he has to venture into the darkness of his house with his torch to find a new bulb. Once he has completed his expedition he realises that he doesn't need to be afraid of the dark anymore.
To continue with the themes explore in our Topic Book our role play area this week was called 'The Dark.' The windows had been blacked out and there was a black out tent. We provided some torches so that we explore what we can find in the dark and looked at pictures of night time scenes and nocturnal animals.
In Art we developed our fine motor skills as we recreated a scene from our book of the week. The children had to cut out toys that they might see if they shone a torch over them creating a beam of light. In Literacy we thought about why the dark is good and the children came up with wonderful answers such as "because we can go to sleep" and "so we can have bedtime stories." We also looked at the food chain of an eagle, as inspired by a child's comment and had lots of discussions about how the dark can benefit us. Elsewhere in the Classroom we made shadow puppets, looked at weight using the scales, built puzzles and developed our turn taking skill sand understanding of board games.
At the start of the week we went on a community walk where we looked at charity shops discussing why they are important and why we should donate things to them that we no longer need.
On the journey to our Outdoor Learning Day we continued our observational skills and questioning of the world around us. The Squirrels asked lots of interesting questions such as "what is under the bricks on the pavement?" This snowballed until we reached the core of the earth! We used this as an opportunity to discuss lava, craters and volcanoes in the sea bed as well as discussing things which are hot such as burning oneself on a barbecue and needing an ice pack.
Over the past two weeks we have been exploring emotions with the Squirrels. This is a great topic to support the children’s emotional, social and personal development and we have used this topic to have discussions about why we feel certain emotions and how we can manage them moving forward. It has also been lovely to discuss things that make us happy and excited.
To extend our learning we decided to make emotion faces out of animal friendly play dough on our Outdoor Learning Day, using natural materials to decorate our faces with eyes, hair, mouths and noses! Once we got to the common we made emotion faces using animal friendly dough and natural objects. It was a lovely day and a nice end to the week!