Squirrels News - 2nd February 2024

This week was the final push before the opening of our art exhibition so the children have been busy making the finishing touches to their artwork in our Focus Time sessions. In Circle Time we continued working to develop the Squirrels phonics and number recognition, as well as focusing on the children’s individual targets during 1:1 sessions such as comprehension work, blending, adding detail to a picture and name writing.

Around the classroom the children have been exploring a range of free art using various materials from collage to ink, chalk, pastels, watercolours and pencil. It has been a lot of fun seeing what the children have independently created from story books to trains, planes and even a spider!

When it was time to head outside for our Outdoor Learning Day, we noticed the last few Winter berries on the trees as well as the first signs of Spring with a few new buds starting to sprout on the trees as well as a pair of daffodils! Once we got to the common we ate our snack then went about the morning thinking about measurements.

We noticed lots of fallen sticks and worked together to order them by size. We then extended the activity and had a lot of fun seeing if we could find any sticks which were longer than us!

The children climbed our favourite tree and created various imaginary words during the lovely crisp morning before it was time to head back to the nursery for our Art Exhibition. The children were so proud to show their loved ones around the exhibition and explain to them what they had been doing. They also loved sitting with their adults to watch the Dance they had produced which depicted them growing into tall trees from a tiny seed and braving all of the elements.

It has been a wonderful topic with some astounding results and whilst we will be sad to say goodbye to our artists topic, for now we are looking forward to what next week brings!