Spring Term Week 2
We have had a really busy week, enjoying exercise outside which has included football, gross motor bingo, balloon catch and riding the bikes.
Our Costa role play has been lovely and the staff have been able to support that all week, coming up with vocabulary and ideas and helping the children to learnt o take care of the props and take turns and chat to each other and some lovely independent play was able to be developed. We are changing the Costa to a mini supermarket next week and would love a wide range of items to sell – empty packaging, lots of different kinds of boxes, any packaging with different languages on would be brilliant and any interesting foods from around the world would be good too. No glass please and nothing with food inside or anything that did have nuts inside but a range of boxes and packets would be brilliant.
Inside we have enjoyed science week on the sun table! Lots of experiments and exploring the concepts of gravity and weight, floating and sinking, making volcanoes and if you have a look at our facebook you will see one experiment that really didn’t work! During our planning session we found “Biro leaves” – it is a perfect example of Pinterest vs real life!! Luckily it is an important skill to be able to make a mistake, try and solve a problem and manage our feelings when something goes wrong and even more luckily all our staff a great role models!!
Our circle times have had a focus on shapes, we are working on next steps for the children and ideas for home learning for areas too and will be sharing these after our key person meeting on Monday evening. Writing observations and sharing information really helps each staff member work out where a child is developmentally and where we can go next – either as a challenge for them or an area for nurture.
The Sun and Moons have enjoyed a shape hunt outside, played shape bingo, matched and sorted 2 D shapes, explored shapes within shapes for a matching pairs game, made 2 D shapes from lollipops, played a shape stepping stone game, completed a task to match all the shapes on a shape bus and played a shape monster sorting game too!
Forest School has been a bit damp but enjoyable this week and the Suns and Moons have settled into the new pattern really well. The children love to take turns to light the fire and Sophie had lots of lovely child led role play observations – 3 girls turned the willow dome into a stables for their ponies and unicorns, a group made a restaurant from the mud kitchen and another set up a food delivery service using the wheel barrow – delivering mud cup cakes to Sophie and Louise!
The Star group have also had a busy week, they have separated out for a few circles to ensure that all children are getting the right level of support to learn and sometimes being in a smaller group benefits them from a concentration perspective. Group leaders are planning carefully and circle supports will be making more observations too. The Stars have played matching the shape games, a shape corner game, made simple houses using shapes and matched different bricks on a big sheet of paper too -some lovely photos from the week!
Next week we are going to be junk modelling so donations of boxes and toilet rolls, tape and string would be lovely please and we will be concentrating on phonics and letters and sounds in our circle times in Sun and Moon and on music and dance and songs and rhymes in Star.
Have a lovely weekend – Amelia