Squirrels News - 27th September 2024

This week the children performed their Harvest Festival Show to their grown-ups and in celebration, we focused on the book Pick a Circle, Gather Squares, A Fall Harvest of Shapes by Felicia Sanzari Chernesky. We discussed why the harvest is important and why the children were donating tinned food. We also used the discussion around sharing and caring for others to look at our person of interest this term ‘Ian Mckellen’ who helps and volunteers with the charity ‘Crisis.’

During Art we discussed different foods and their shapes before creating a collaborative class art display of wonderful harvest foods presented in their different forms. The children continued to develop their pen grip and control as we wrote about the various fruits and vegetables we like to eat. We have also been focusing on patterns this week in Numeracy.

At the end of the week the children took part in the eagerly anticipated Harvest Festival. Everyone did so well up on the stage, singing and joining in with the actions. It was wonderful to see the new Squirrels so confident on the stage. After the show we headed out on a community walk to Utter Waffle as a special treat. This was to celebrate how well the children performed during the Harvest Festival. It also celebrated how well the children have transitioned into the Squirrels classroom.

This visit also extended and responded to the children's play as during our Supermarket Role Play many of the children acted out their grown-ups ordering hot drinks. The children were all greeted by our server, and individually ordered babycinos, making sure to use their pleases and thank yous. The drinks were delicious and the children used the straws and spoons to get every last drop out of their mugs. We then spoke about how we were going to pay for our drinks. This is another discussion which had arisen from our Role Play area this week as whilst the school till had pretend coins and notes inside many of the children commented that their grown-ups pay by phone or card "beep, beep."

After our lovely treat we headed to the supermarket where we practised our phonics by identifying the initial letter sounds of various foods. This followed on from a phonics session earlier in the week where we identified the initial letter sounds of food in our book of the week. The children did very well as they repeated the sounds. We then thought of other food items which started with the same sound.