This week we focused on a wonderful book called Barbara Throws a Wobbler by Nadia Shireen which the children loved. In the story Barbara is in a bad mood. As she gets more worked up a physical red cloud appears over Barbara's head before finally Barbara throws a gigantic 'wobbler'. The book offered a great platform to talk about anger, how it can manifest and how we can control it. We also discussed other emotions and thought about what colour the cloud over our head might be and why for each different emotion. There was lots of wonderful ideas with one of the Squirrels deciding, "Yellow could be happy because it's bright."
Alongside the theme of emotions we also revisited our learning about symmetry from the previous week. The children loved exploring the topic and even started to create symmetrical patterns independently during Free Play using the loose parts and our light up boards. This idea of symmetry meaning both sides are the same led to the children discovering items around the classroom which were identical such as glue sticks and some of our role play fairies. Symmetry has proved to be a lovely topic to extend the Squirrels learning through a range of different activities and has really sparked the children's interest.
In our Outdoor Learning Environment we have had lots of fun creating dinosaur handprints and footprints and giving all the teachers a fright with our loud roars! We also enjoyed painting and segmenting CVC words on the various mark-making boards. Around the classroom we focused on exploring numbers and developing our counting skills. We searched for wooden numbers and natural objects hidden amongst sand and went on to build towers out of Lego to correspond with the numbers we had found around the classroom.
We also created shapes on our fantastic light up boards, sorted objects beginning with their initial sound and became postal workers in our Post Office Role Play Area. This led to some great discussions about the people who help us and it was great to see the Squirrels using their experiences from home and nursery to inform their conversations. We continued our conversations about the people that help us on our walk to the Common where we spotted Lollipop ladies, bus drivers and postmen! On our Outdoor Learning Day this week we had a great time playing hide and seek, climbing on the trees and developing our fine motor skills by pegging objects, such as leaves, onto a washing line. The highlight of the day however was our parachute activity where we collected leaves, placed them on top of the parachute and watched them fly into the air as we lifted the parachute up!