The Kits have had an amazing last week of term and have been getting very excited for the Christmas holidays. We’ve been busy getting into the festive spirit with lots of Christmas themed activities, rehearsing our Nativity play and had a fabulous Christmas party with dancing and games. Our role-play area this week as been set up as a ‘Christmas Home Corner’ and the children have loved decorating the Christmas tree with tinsel and baubles and pretending to make each other special festive dinners in the Christmas Kitchen.
In Maths we have developed our numerical skills by matching the number of dots on the Christmas trees to the numerals on the pegs and refined our hand strength as we cut out Christmas trees and stars from the play dough. We decided to develop our fine motor skills further through a number of other Christmas themed activities which included pretending to wrap presents with wrapping paper, and cutting around the edges of a triangle with scissors to turn it into a Christmas tree.
During Cookery we continued our festive theme by making delicious mincemeat. The children all listened to their teachers’ instructions and carefully used the knives to cut the apples into small pieces. They also focused hard on using spoons to transfer the raisins and sultanas into their bowls. We explored the different ingredients used and the children were fascinated to smell the cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice before adding them to their mincemeat. As we passed the spices around, we all commented on the different smells we could smell, trying to using descriptive language to explain how what they smelt like!
The most exciting part of making it however was squeezing the oranges and the children used all their strength to push down hard and squeeze the juice out. Finally, once all the ingredients were mixed together the children spooned their mincemeat into jars. We were so impressed by how brilliantly the children respond to the instructions and everyone was very excited to take their finished mincemeat home. It’s been lovely hearing from the parents about the mince pies they have gone on to make with their children afterwards and one child even had it on their porridge for breakfast the next day. How delicious!
We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and look forward to seeing the children in the new year.