The Kits have have had a great week this week, preparing for Christmas and practising for our Nativity Show at the end of term. We are really proud of how quickly the children have learnt the words and actions to the songs and we are starting to get excited for the big day!
As well as preparing for Christmas, the Kits have been very engaged in imaginary role-play this week. Our role-play area has been set up as a ‘Hairdressers’ and the children have been busy styling their teachers’ and each other’s hair and have had great fun trying on the wigs! They have also been busy at work 'at the office', working with the laptops and taking important phone calls. In the office the Kits discussed the different ways people they know travel to work, including by tube, train and car! So, we decided to extend this by creating our own 'train' by placing all the chairs in a row. We sat in a line and went on an amazing train ride to the zoo and then on to the seaside. It was wonderful to see the children working together to extend their imaginary role play and combining their imagination from scenarios they have experinced at home.
During our Literacy Focus Time activity this week we concentrated on Animaphonics, focusing on the ‘O’ phoneme. We read the poem which accompanies the phoneme and played with oranges, octopuses, otters and orange gloop! We also developed our pen control as we completed the Animaphonics worksheets during Free Play where we focused on drawing ‘O’s on the page. The Kits' fine motor skills are continuing to develop and we were really impressed with the children pen control and focus when tracing the letters.
In Free Play the Kits always love playing with the playdough. As well as helping them to develop their hand strength the activities involving playdough also help to support their communication and language development. When playing with the playdough the children often incorporate their imagination and role play into their creations by making things such as snakes, balls and cookies!
We continued to develop our hand strength and our ability to make delicious creations from dough in our Cookery lesson by making sugar free gingerbread men. The children all helped to measure and weigh the different ingredients and we introduced new some vocabulary including ‘ginger’ and ‘spice’. We discussed what the terms meant and tried to think of examples of where we could use these words in sentences. The Kits loved rolling out the dough with the rolling pins and then had the opportunity to cut out their gingerbread men using the cutters. After we finished making our gingerbread men, the children were very excited to be able to make some creations of their own from the leftover dough with the most popular creations being ‘wiggly worms’ and ‘pancakes’. The children were all very proud to take their gingerbread men home and we were lucky enough to have some left over for snack time the next day! Yummy!