Squirrels News - March 11th 2022

This week we have been reading the book Somebody Swallowed Stanley which has made us think about the importance and different ways we can care for our environment. In the story, we follow a plastic bag called Stanley as he travels in the ocean. Unfortunately, many of the creatures think that Stanley is food and end up swallowing him. This made us very sad, and the children all showed great concern for the creatures who ended up swallowing Stanley. We spoke about why Stanley had ended up in the ocean and learned that this was because the plastic bag had not been recycled properly.

Over the course of the week we learned about recyclable and non-recyclable materials and explored them further in our Role Play Are which had been set up as a Recycling Centre. The children loved working together to sort through the materials and this was a great activity to encourage the children to look at different textures and materials and to understand what made an material recyclable or not.

In Art we took inspiration from our topic book and made turtles, but luckily, unlike the turtles in the story, these ones lived happily in the water which was free from plastic. In Numeracy we matched numerals to quantities as we worked out how many of each recyclable item, we had to take to the refuse centre.

We continued the fun and learning on our Outdoor Learning Day. On our way to the common we played ‘Eye Spy’ and we were so impressed with all the Squirrels wonderful answers such as "w for window." "r for road" and "b for ball."

We also bumped into the rubbish collectors and asked them questions about the different colour refuse bags they were sorting identifying. We learned that the different coloured bags tell us whether the rubbish inside is recyclable or non-recyclable.

Once we arrived at the common we read our book of the week before heading off to search for and collect rubbish using the litter picker. The children really enjoyed using the litter picker and understood that this was an important task, and how cleaning up rubbish was linked to helping the environment.

Once we had collected the rubbish the children decided to build their own model city using sticks, leaves and stones. Later in the morning we played a game of ‘pass the parcel’ where each layer was paper we could recycle. Inside each layer were letter tiles and the children had to identify objects starting with that letter. The centre of the parcel was very exciting as it contained a blow-up ball with letters on. We played catch and when you caught the ball you had identify something which started with a letter on the ball!

We have had a lot of fun this week and can’t wait for all the learning opportunities in store next week!