We have had an amazing celebration of books and reading this week in the Squirrels classroom to celebrate World Book Day. The children were invited to bring in their favourite stories for us to read each day and it has been wonderful to share our our favourite books with each other.
Following on from last week's Outdoor Learning Day we used the natural materials we had collected to make nature bookmarks. The children arranged leaves, petals and feathers inside a laminate sheet before putting it through the laminator to make their very own bookmarks. The children hole punched and threaded their chosen colour of thread and were excited to take them home to use!
In Science this week we explored gravity and balance. The children were encourage to think about why objects always fall downwards and we introduced them to the force of gravity as a pull to earth. We went on to explore why there are differences in the speed at which objects fall. We compared a single piece of paper to a book and the children made predictions as to whether they thought the objects would fall at the same or different speeds and which would fall the fastest. Everyone agreed that the book was heaviest and would fall the fastest which led us to think about how air resistance pushes the paper upwards, slowing it down. Lastly the children had the opportunity to try and balance the paper and books on their heads to explore balance!
Thursday was World Book Day and everyone, including the teachers, celebrated by dressing up as a book character! It was lovely to see all of the different ideas and costumes come to life. The children shared their chosen book titles. They explained the plots, named the characters and described which were their favourite parts of the book before illustrating the book's cover. The children each took a book token home to purchase a new story to enjoy.
We continued our celebration of books and stories into Outdoor Learning Day on Friday. We were lucky that the sun peeked out for us behind the clouds and we began the day by recapping our safety rules before enjoying some Free Play where the children were excited to climb and explore in and around the trees. Christopher and Caia climbed the highest with Christopher always eager to go higher! After a short Free Play we explained our World Book Day themed activity.
Our task was to create our own version of the ‘That’s not my...’ series. We focused our story on the title ‘That’s not my Squirrel’ using descriptive language to describe the textures, colours and materials we could find. The children generated a host of adjectives describing leaves as ‘too smooth’, puddles as ‘too wet’ and tree trunks as ‘too rough’. We will use these to create our own book back at Nursery next week. While looking for different textures the children found mud and they all got squishing with their boots. This made worms appear and suddenly we were inundated, counting a total of thirteen worms! The children loved watching them wiggle around and commented on their sizes.
After snack Christopher requested to plant the pips from Miss Chantelle's apple. He and Alice dug little holes and placed a few pips inside, before covering them over with soil and then giving it a little drink of water. To extend our learning from Wednesday's Science focus on gravity and balance we decided to set up a series of races! We began with an egg and spoon race, trying our best to travel while balancing the eggs on the spoons. Next we had a bean bag race where we had to keep the bean bags steady on our heads. This quickly led to a running race instigated by the children.
To finish the day, we decided to have some quiet story time in the den on the common. Everyone got comfy and after perusing the books independently we settled down to listen to a few stories together. It was a lovely way to finish a great week!
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