This week, we have been focusing on 'people who help us' and have been exploring different role-play opportunities, including a veterinary surgery, doctors' surgery, building site, hairdresser, and post office!  We have observed some lovely play, with children now much more confident to elaborate on their ideas and extend their play.  The doctors' surgery was particularly busy - the doctors donned their scrubs and asked the patients to sit down ready for their jabs (inspired by recent preschool jabs!).  We extended the learning opportunities further by encouraging the doctors to write up their patient notes - with some lovely mark making, pre-writing, and attempts at letter formation observed.

We have also focused on rhyming stories this week, with 'Oi Frog' and 'Chocolate Mousse for Greedy Goose' just two of our favourites.  We have considered what a rhyming word is, and have had a go at trying to recognise them in the stories we've been reading.  We have also played a rhyming pairs matching game, and tried to come up with our own rhyming strings!

Another popular story has been, 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'.  To extend this story further, we set up a sensory tuff tray themed on the story, complete with swishy swashy grass, water to splosh through, mud, snow, a forest, and a cave!  This enabled children to revisit the story and talk about key events from the book, as well as explore the textures and explore the vocabulary needed to describe these textures.

Balancing has been popular in the garden.  At the start of the week, the staff set up a simple balancing activity with our crates - but, by the end of the week, the children had taken ownership of this and were creating their own, ever more complex and challenging, assault courses!  Using crates, wooden planks, wooden blocks, and even the trampoline - we filled half of the garden with an assault course.  This offered a great opportunity for balancing, but also helped children to experience a certain level of risk - it's important that children can experience some risk to enable them to develop problem solving skills and form an understanding of consequences.  We followed this up by reading the tale of 'Little Monkey' - a book about having to be brave!

Finally, with the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend, we enjoyed creating our own bird feeders this week.  We threaded cheerios onto pipe-cleaners and hung these in the garden.  We then discussed what we thought might eat our food, with answers ranging from; 'flying cats', 'ducks', 'fire breathing dragons', and, 'maybe even a pigeon!' To encourage mark making, we suggested the children draw signs to tell the birds or dragons where to eat!

Other popular activities this week have included; construction with stickle bricks, Duplo, and wooden blocks, marble run, baby bath time, and our weekly Jolly Jo sports session.  We've also explored colour mixing, chromatography, making our own playdough, and listening games.

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

Why not get involved in the RSPB's Big Garden Bird Watch at home? You could watch for different birds in a garden, from a window, or whilst on a walk? What birds did you see? What colours were they? Can you count them? The link below has lots of resources to support this initiative, you could even make your own toilet-roll binoculars to help you!

Big Garden Birdwatch | Join the fun - The RSPB

We started this week by extending the children's interest in camouflage - a yellow themed tuff tray with yellow ducks, animal prints with jungle animals, arctic animals in an icy landscape, and even red rescue vehicles hidden against a red backdrop!  This led us to explore the patterns we could observe in the animal prints - looking at spots and stripes and trying to recreate these in paint.

Following last week's interest in paper aeroplanes and things that fly, and coupled with the windy weather this week, we have had fun making our own kites!  We decorated our kites, and then used a hole punch before adding the string and racing around the garden to see how well our kites would fly!

This term we have been exploring an 'all about me' topic - to extend this further, we shared a book called, 'Whose in my Family?' This led to a lively carpet-time discussion about who we live with, any brothers and sisters, and even pets.  This is a lovely opportunity for children to develop an understanding of who they are, and to discuss their similarities and differences to others.

Shapes have been a focus this week.  We have explored various resources, such as our magnetic shape boards, peg shape boards, and tap-a-shape.  To link in with this, we went on a shape hunt at carpet-time!  We looked at each shape and considered what it looked like and how many sides it had, before then hunting the room to see if we could find that shape! We found a circle clock, a triangle Christmas tree picture, a square window, a rectangle table, and a circle fire alarm!

Finally, we have been enjoying the classic tale of 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.'  We initially set up an open-ended  role play scenario with the 3 bears sat eating their porridge in the home corner.  We then modelled scenes from the story, and read the book, substituting the Bears' names for the children's names (which our children found hilarious!).  We extended this further, by acting out the story during carpet-time - encouraging children to join in with repeated refrains from the book; "whose been eating my porridge, whose been sitting in my chair, and whose been sleeping in my bed?!"

Other popular activities this week have included measuring ourselves to find who was tallest, Jolly Jo sports where we weaved in and out of cones, played an egg and spoon race, and played our car game, building with our wooden blocks, and exploring phonics with our Leapfrog Phonics Train.

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

Why not continue our discussion about family? Talk about whose important in your family, and any important events, festivals or traditions you observe.  Looking at photos is a wonderful way to start a conversation. 

The children have very much initiated this week's themes of play and demonstrated why we promote a child-led ethos - if children are empowered to explore their own ideas and interests - they will be better engaged and inspired to learn. Our job is to then extend their learning and scaffold new ideas and experiences!

This was evident when one of our children took an interest in paper aeroplanes.  We have spent the week learning how to make our own paper aeroplanes and competing to see whose could go furthest!  This interest was then taken into our Tuesday Jolly Jo session, where we had aeroplane races in the big hall and used planes as the basis for different  games.  We then decided to extend the learning further and added mark making and letter formation - encouraging children to decorate their planes and write their own names on them! Next, we added maths!  We hung up numbered hoops to fly through, and encouraged children to keep score.  Our hoops were numbered with 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 100 - with many children able to recognise the numerals and say whether a number was higher or lower than another.

Another example of following child-led themes was when a child said they'd had a fox in their garden!  We used a laptop to view images of foxes, and noted how an image of an arctic fox was hard to see against a snowy background!  This introduced us to the word 'camouflage,' so we discussed exactly what this word means.  We then set up a tuff tray activity filled with grass and leaves, and had to help various animals, bugs and dinosaurs 'camouflage' by painting them the same colour as their background!  The story of the fox also initiated a story-telling theme - many of the children were eager to tell their own stories - so we wrote these down, and encouraged children to draw accompanying pictures to enable us to create their own personalised books!  To ensure all of our children had an opportunity to be involved in story-telling, we did a carpet-time activity where each child had to add an additional element to a story - we then story-mapped this onto a white board so we could retell it - it went something like this...

"A tiger and a monkey in a monster truck flew to the moon and they met an elephant and a bunny who came hopping along!  The monkey was flying in the sky and then they met a dog called Daddy! There was a Lamborghini and a lion. The elephant then ate all the grass and they all went into a tree... a motorbike raced passed - The End!" 

Other popular activities this week have included, marble run - and then using marbles to paint with! Number recognition games, activities and songs.  Exploring our emotions using our mood monsters and our emotion stones. And, bikes, trikes and balancing in the garden.

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

Helping children to create their own stories is a wonderful way to explore how stories work! There has to be a main character, an event, and an ending!  Why not encourage your own story telling at home? You could use a favourite toy or teddy to help spark an idea! Decide where that toy goes - then what happens and how does the story end! We'd love you to share your stories from home - and maybe there could be an accompanying picture too?

It has been a very surreal week with the announcement of further lockdown measures!  Whilst we are able to stay open, we have, understandably, had much lower numbers of children this week and this has given us a chance to focus on small group activities.

We have introduced an 'all about me' theme this week to enable us to focus on children talking about themselves and us linking this in with how we're feeling.  This focus on emotions is even more important in view of the uncertainty caused by lockdown, with many children affected by the situation. We shared a story called, 'I'm the best', all about a dog who upsets his friends by claiming he's better than them.  His friends then point out what they're good at - and Dog becomes sad that he's upset his friends.  This has offered a lovely opportunity for a carpet-time discussion about what makes us feel sad, the impact of making our friends sad, and what we're all good at.

Other popular stories this week have included a book called, 'Superboy' - all about an ordinary boy who turns into a superhero to help others, but needs to look out for 'Dastardly Dad!'  Again, this led to a lovely carpet-time discussion about superheroes, with the children deciding what superhero powers they felt the staff might have!  This story also introduced the word 'super villain' and we discussed what the word 'villain' might mean... according to the children it's, "the one who takes over the World!!"

Space has been a popular child-led theme this week.  A large box inspired us to build a rocket - with children using pens and craft provisions to decorate their rocket.  We then made space rocks and planets using scrunched up foil!  We shared a fact book that looked at all of the different planets, and children discussed having seen the moon.  At carpet-time, we shared our favourite space inspired songs and talked about what we might see if we were astronauts in space!

We have enjoyed playing Orchard games this week, working in groups of 4 to take turns to match objects.  We've also been playing a shark game - using small rods to fish items from the shark's mouth before the shark chomps down!

A final activity we've enjoyed this week is tap-a-shape.  Using small tacks and hammers, we have practiced our fine motor skills by tapping these tacks through shapes to make patterns and pictures.  We observed lovely levels of focus as children were very careful to do this safely.

Other popular activities this week have included, bikes in the garden, dancing on the carpet, threading to make necklaces, and mixing water and flour to explore textures in the tuff tray.

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

Why not continue our carpet time discussion about what makes us happy or sad?  It's important to help children to talk about their emotions and to give them the language to do so.

This link gives some fantastic ideas to talk to children about how they're feeling...

How to talk to your child about emotions - CBeebies - BBC

Our festive theme continued this week, with a nativity scene inspiring small world play, mark making opportunities as we decorated a range of Christmas trees, snowflakes and gingerbread men, and sensory play as we explored Father Christmas's shaving foam beard!  We also enjoyed exploring textures with story props from the story, That's not my Santa' - where we encouraged children to explore a range of descriptive language to describe the different textures.

To add to the Christmas excitement this week, the children were excited to have a visit from Father Christmas on Thursday!  We heard a faint jingling bell in the distance, and the thud of reindeer hooves from above, before Father Christmas appeared outside of the window!  From a socially safe distance in the garden, we shared some festive songs, with children assuring him they were on the 'good list!'.  The children were overjoyed when he left a sack of gifts for them all!

As well as all of our festive fun, we have continued to engage with the children's interests which, this week, have included opportunities to dress up!  With a collection of 'clippy cloppy' shoes, and Disney princess dresses - many of our children have enjoyed role-play opportunities.  We extended this by enjoying music and movement to Disney music - showing off our best dance moves!

The children's interest in puppets was extended this week, as we repurposed our shop into a puppet theatre!  We created a range of superhero puppets to engage those who have been inspired by superhero play, as well as story characters to play with.  Many of the children took turns to put on a show as they built up their role-play ideas.  The children's interest in Superheroes also enabled us to explore some outdoor mark making opportunities.  Using chunky chalks, we started to draw on the summer house wall our favourite characters, with some children even attempted letters from their names!

Letter recognition is an emerging skill for some of our children, with many being able to recognise letters from their name.  We used this as a basis for an activity this week using labeled bottle tops 'baubles' and a Christmas tree cut out where children could match the letters on the bottle tops to the corresponding letters on the tree.  

Other popular activities this week have included, sharing fact books, including an atlas, our laptop games, and balancing activities in the garden.  We also enjoyed our Jolly Jo session where we had to help Father Christmas match coloured toys to the right coloured chimney, played a shark and fishes game, and moved like animals, vehicles, and superheroes!

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

Mark making is often a concern to parents who worry their child won't pick up a pencil and write.  It's important to keep mark making fun and to give children a reason to write!  Many won't simply write if given a pencil and paper, but they might if they're writing a shopping list whilst playing shops, or drawing a road on the floor with chalks for their cars, or making a treasure map ready to look for pirate treasure!  If you use your child's interests as a starting point and give them a reason to write, they will be much more inclined to have a go!