Spring Term Week 9

We have gone animal mad this week and we have created our own jungle in the Sun room! It is very atmospheric and the children have really loved playing “Longleat” and we even had photos of a monkey on a family’s car to share! The ladies have built safari cars and binoculars and set up a ticket office with laptops and leaflets from Longleat too. Alongside the safari park we have also learnt about sheep and cows and created animal fact sheets, we have made hungry caterpillar necklaces and Elmer craft with beautiful rainbow tissue paper.

Our Farm shop has been very busy undercover and the children have enjoyed the role play and have been carrying lots of shopping around the garden and the tills and play money are very popular – helping us to teach the language of money, look at the shapes of the coins and the numbers on them, matching them to the numbers on the tills.

The mud kitchen has been so busy this week with some wonderful herbs and petals, oats and out of date cereals to add into the mud pies.

We carry the theme of the week into our circle times as well and the Star group have danced and sung away to the Animal Boogie, they have made elephant footprints, taken part in animal yoga, made snakes for our display and paper plate chicks too.

The Sun and Moon group have learnt about turtles and parrots – we have had some fantastic feedback on our circle times during our parent consultations as the children do go home and chatter about what they have learnt which is so lovely for us! The group have made rainmakers to use in our pretend rain forest and really explored animal patterns and played a matching game on the laptop. The group have been really creative this week and are really learning to take their time and persevere and enjoy the process of making something rather than rushing back to free flow time. Robot Reg came last week but on Thursday the session was a literacy session with Michelle and the children were amazing, we can really measure the progress they are making.

We also had a lovely walk to the Walronds on Thursday afternoon with the Sun group – they explored the gardens there and we did the Willow trail which they loved! Lots of photos on the blog – we were hoping to take the Moon group on Friday afternoon but the weather is against us and we would have some very soggy children, we will rearrange the trip for another afternoon for them when the weather is brighter.

Next week we are continuing with our farm shop and creating a cafe as well – we would love donations of herbal tea bags, and any old metal tea pots, large or small to help us have enough for everyone to be pouring out the lovely fragrant tea for their customers! We will be concentrating on mark making and maths inside, and using the jungle for role play as well.