Our topic book this week has been Jesus' Christmas Party by Nicholas Allen, which is also the inspiration behind our Nativity play this year. The story is told from the perspective of the innkeeper who is very grumpy with all the commotion and all the noise from baby Jesus's visitors waking him up! The children absolutely loved identifying their characters in the story and the book really helped to bring the Nativity to life!
In other areas of the classroom, the Role Play Area was set up as a doctors surgery which captured the children's imaginations as they helped a multitude of patients with broken arms, coughs and colds and upset tummies. I was amazed to see the level of care our Squirrel doctors gave to their patients, attentively checking their temperatures and carefully putting on bandages and I would definitely feel safe in our budding doctors' care!
In Science we set up an experiment to explore the changing states of matter. In our activity we explored water and wax and experimented with how we could make them melt and harden. The children loved this experiment so much that we decided to adapt the experiment in various ways across the week. We also explored weighing, learning how to use the weighing scales and experimenting with how to make different objects balance.
In Free Play we continued to play group games such as letter bingo and number dominos which has helped to continue our development around sharing, turn taking, listening and the ability to accept that in games we do not always win but that is part of playing the game!
In our Outdoor Learning Environment we developed our number recognition to 10 through lots of fun games of hopscotch. We also practised our balancing skills by climbing on the logs and developed our letter recognition by looking for the different initial letter sounds dotted around the walls. We worked together to think of objects beginning with each letter and even tried writing some of the letters in the sand. The children also enjoyed exploring mark -marking in the mud by making tracks through the mud with the toy cars.
We had a magical day on the common this week for our Outdoor Learning Day. It was a lovely Autumnal day with the sun shining through the trees and the leaves blowing in the wind. To make the most of the beautiful weather we played games of tag, hide and seek and duck, duck goose which was an extremely big hit. We also took the opportunity to practise our nativity outside and were so impressed with the levels of enthusiasm and gusto shown by the Squirrels! When it was time to leave the children protested, exclaiming that they were having so much fun. However, it really was time to go and we had a lovely walk back where we tried to see how many shapes we could spot in the natural environment. We can't wait for the adventures that lie ahead for us next week in the beautiful changing landscape that is our area of the common, as the seasons come to pass.