What a wonderful week it has been in Early Years! The children are fast becoming experts of their classroom environment and have been enjoying getting to know Mrs Neal, one of their new teachers! They will get to meet Mrs Webb next week and show her how fantastic they truly are. Something that makes these children SO fantastic, is how independently they have been able to navigate their tricky forest outfits! After just one demonstration, the children followed each instruction perfectly and were all able to put their own suits on themselves!
Forest school was really enjoyable this week as we had a lovely visit from one of our mummies! We had a lot of fun exploring different berries and even got messy testing them out as paints! This learning inspired us later on to explore some herbs from our outside area with our sense of smell. Thank you so much to Miss Handley; the children were really buzzing with excitement!
This week, we welcomed Mrs Lloyd-Williams, our Early Years governor, to come and teach us a little bit about how to look after Snowy and Cookie. The children were shown how the guinea pigs’ claws were looked after and taught about the different foods they like to eat (coriander was a clear hit)! Later on, the children all got to stroke Snowy and Cookie, having learnt about how to pet them gently, with soft hands and tickly fingers (Cookie seems to like a tickle behind the ears)!
Continuing our learning from previous weeks, we have been thinking a lot about feelings. The children enjoyed a song all about feelings, based on the story Scribble Spot. This made us think about different times that we have felt certain emotions, such as anger, happiness and sadness. During choosing time, the children painted and drew their own ‘scribble spots’ with many of them choosing to do a ‘rainbow’ spot, representing all the different emotions they have felt!
Our literacy, based on Ruby’s Worry continued our thinking all about feelings, as we explored how Ruby’s worry started off small, but then got bigger, and bigger, until is was enormous! The children enjoyed thinking of vocabulary to describe the size of the growing (and shrinking) worry. Our maths work on sorting came in handy for this as we thought about different words that would mean the same as small, and those that might be synonyms for big. The discussion that followed was fantastic as the children rated the words on a scale of ‘how big’ their meaning was. They decided that a massive worry was bigger that a large worry, and that an enormous and gigantic worry was the biggest one of all! The children then enjoyed linked activities using this wonderful vocabulary, with Ash class choosing a word to write within a sentence, and Saplings experimenting with size within their mark making, as they practiced circular movements on large (or massive?) paper! As you can see, the children have been working so hard with their writing, and Ash class have now learnt g o c and k too. Saplings are enjoying experimenting with marks and also learning to copy or write their names!
Of course, a huge highlight of our week was having our family join us for Learning Together Morning! Thank you to all those who were able to make it, the children really enjoyed showing you their classroom and the different activities they get up to during the day.
