The children have enjoyed a cooler week this week, and have spent lots of time in the outside area engaging in role play narratives with one another! We have seen everything from baby play dates and picnics, to ‘detectives’ and den building.
We even made time for a campfire in the forest with Connor, to celebrate our Forest School journey this year! We enjoyed watching and listening to the popcorn and flickering flames.
Ash class have done amazingly well in their final phonics assessments of the year! Not only have they retained so many of their taught sounds, they are also beginning to grapple with word endings such as -es and -ed. This is quite a tricky skill, and the children are becoming excellent at figuring out which words need a little ‘tweaking’ after blending! Saplings too have been impressing their teachers as they have been practising representing the sounds that they have learnt with recognisable written marks.
The children have also been enjoying using maps this week. Not only has this allowed excellent practice of their positional and directional language, but it has also honed in on their fine motor skills through writing and drawing, as well as their story retelling, having retold the story of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt through their story maps. The children were so detailed with this activity and even made sure that the caves they drew were big enough for the bear to hide inside!
Of course, the main spotlight was on art this week, as we celebrated Diversity through art. In EYFS, we focused on the concept of diversity through colour, having been inspired by the story Out of the Blue by Robert Tregoning. With difference celebrated through the use of colour, we became inspired by the work of Vashti, the fictional character in the story The Dot by Peter Reynolds; someone who very much thought she was not good at something, until she made her mark, and saw where it took her.
The fictional work of Vashti, and the famous work of Kandinsky acted as our inspiration to make our own marks. Paint mixing allowed us to explore tonal colours through a sponging technique, whilst colour blocking helped us to explore contrast.
Thank you for coming to our art exhibition on a very hot Friday afternoon, and of course, for continuing our celebration of colour with us at The Colour Run!