There has been a buzz of excitement in the Squirrels' classroom this week as we entered into December. To celebrate the start of the festive period we have enjoyed reading a variety of Christmas books. We took inspiration from these Christmas stories to go on to create lots of festive craft pieces in Art and have enjoyed decorating the classroom as well as opening our advent calendar each day. Our advent calendar contains a different book each day and we have used these to extend the development of our language and vocabulary. We discovered that these books contain lots of new words and have loved learning what they mean and discussing how we can use them in our everyday conversations.
This week we have also had the opportunity to try on our costumes for our upcoming Nativity. Everyone loved trying on their outfits and it really helped bring everyone characters to life! Nativity practice has been a big part of the week and we have been so proud of how brilliantly the Squirrels have been at saying their lines loudly and singing the songs with confidence!
Our role play this week has been set up as the 'Oaktree campsite'. The children have loved bird watching and working together to make campfires to cook their food on. They have particularly loved washing up after their meals, taking care to make sure everything is dry and put away neatly. It has been lovely to see the children using their own experiences to extend their role play scenarios and sharing stories of times when they have been camping with their families and what foods they like to eat!
In Free Play the Squirrels have continued to create patterns and have extended their turn taking skills by playing lots of games together which have centred on numeracy and literacy recognition. We have also developed our fine motor skills by working hard to practise how to write our names and develop our pen grip. The children have been learning rainbow words (tricky words) and we have been looking at numbers to 12.
Outside the children have loved experimenting with the plastic cars and mud where they loved making roads for the cars to go down and observing how quickly they could travel. We also extended our imagination skills by creating stories using puppets and building sandcastles.
When it was time for our Outdoor Learning Day the children had great fun learning all about shelters before creating their one as a group! They worked together to discus and decide the best way to keep it in place and went on to search for the best materials to make sure it was strong! We finished the day by playing hide and seek and having a great time exploring the natural environment!
