On Monday the children created a den indoors with a large piece of material draped across the furniture.  They added cushions, tea sets and play-dough and had a wonderful time in their new home.  The den theme continued throughout the week and on Wednesday when the weather was particularly wet and windy, we decided to have snack under cover too.  The children enjoyed hot chocolate along with their usual fruit and biscuit.  We sang songs around the pretend camp-fire and waited for the sun to come out again.

Crafts this week have continued to be based around the signs of autumn and some very interesting prints have been created by rolling an acorn dipped in paint across a piece of paper.  There has been a large spiders web hanging across our window this week and it looks very ghostly as it shimmers with raindrops.  The web has inspired lots of spider drawings and creations of webs using glue and glitter.

The marble run has been very popular this week and we have made unceasingly large structures to roll the marbles through.

Our book of the week was the story of a hen who collected wheat to make bread.  We have been talking about the ingredients needed to make bread and how we collect things that we grow.  We will continue this theme after the half term break with some cooking, including making bread with different types of flour; including rice flour, wholemeal and plain.

The week ended with a birthday party and cake for one of our children who is four at the weekend.

Words we have learned this week:

Wheat

Web

Ideas to continue this weeks fun at home:

Don't forget to try our half term challenge.  You should have received a sponsor form and an outline of an acorn this week in your tray.  Details are also on Facebook if you were unable to pick up the forms.

Have a lovely half term holiday and we look forward to seeing you  on Monday 2nd November.  On the first Monday we will be welcoming the new Little Squirrels toddler group in the afternoon by singing them some of our favourite songs.

This week our thoughts have been turning towards autumn and the harvest festival.  The leaves are turning to a lovely variety of golden, orange, yellow and brown tones and the squirrels are busy storing nuts for the winter ahead.

Some of the children had the opportunity to go with staff on short walks in the area to see if they could identify signs that autumn had arrived.  They were extremely well behaved and were enthusiastic in identifying leaves falling from trees, wind blowing and a general chill in the air.  We talked about the mornings and evenings becoming darker and the need to wear a jumper.  The children took a small bucket each and collected evidence to show the rest of us.  We then turned this “evidence” into lovely autumn pictures.

We have talked about the meaning of harvest with the children. This can be quite difficult to explain so we have kept to the simple idea that in autumn all the food has been collected from the ground to get ready for us to use in the winter.  We read the story of the Red Hen who collected wheat to make bread and another story called Oliver's vegetables.

On Wednesday the children visited the lunch club that takes place in the big hall each week.  They sang some of our favourite songs to the members and then presented them all with a harvest gift of biscuits that had been kindly donated by the parents (big thank you if you donated them). The lunch group members were delighted and sent the children a lovely thank you card saying how much they had enjoyed the singing.

The role play area this week became a hospital and we have all been treated for a variety of illnesses.  On one day Fiona even lost her smile and had to be made better by the children telling her jokes and tickling her.  We are happy to report that she is much
better now.

The stickle bricks have been a popular activity this week and the children have made some very complicated constructions.

Words we have learned this week:

Harvest

Autumn

Evidence

Ideas to continue this weeks fun at home:

Continue to look for signs of autumn.  You could count eaves or acorns or chestnuts with your child.  How about seeing  if you can identify a squirrel.

Buy some value shaving foam and put a large blob on a tray or plastic table cloth. Show your child how to swirl it around in a pattern or to form the first letter of their name.  It is great fun and easily washes away.  It even cleans plastic rather well.

We are already five weeks into the new term and the children have really settled in, made new friends and embraced all the new routines and activities on offer. This week we re-visited the Going on a bear hunt story at the children's request.  The children have remembered the words really well and have enjoyed helping us out when the
adults “forget” what comes next!

Learning to share and take turns can, understandably, be a difficult concept for very young children to understand, but this week we have seen some lovely examples of patience, co-operation and turn taking. 

As the children become more confident at Squirrels they use their imagination to create their own games. It is very interesting to observe how they co-operate, problem solve and come up with a variety of new ideas.  An example of this is that we had the balancing beams indoors so that the children could practice their balancing skills.  Eventually one child asked if he could turn it into a track for the trains.  He then organised finding trains, and building blocks to make the station and a group of children had a lovely time playing with their new miniature world.

Art and craft is always a popular activity.  For many of the children the enjoyment simply comes from stirring up the paint, looking at the effects of mixing the colours, gluing small pieces of material to paper or creating models from our recycling container.  Some children took this a step further this week and made bubble pictures.  This is done by mixing paint, water and liquid soap together.  They then blow into it with a straw to create a colourful bubble mountain.  Then they place a piece of paper on top to hold the bubbly pattern.

The water wall continues to be popular, but this week children have adapted some of the materials attached to it such as the funnel, to create new experiments.  This has given us the idea of creating a box of funnels, pipes, tubes etc so that the children can use their own imagination to develop their understanding of science.

We have observed a lot of spiders in the garden and the room this week as we progress into Autumn.  On Friday, many of the children made spiders webs by hole punching around a paper plate and threading pipe cleaners and wool through the holes to create the legs. 

Words we have learned this week:

Web (spiders)

Blowing

Ideas to continue this weeks fun at home:

Practice blowing (not sucking) through a straw.  This can be used to blow small objects such as a tiny ball or piece of cotton across a table.  This fun game is also a very useful
technique in the development of speech  as it helps to strengthen muscles used to form sounds.

On Monday we were delighted to welcome Neil from Rugby Pups into Squirrels.  Neil is going to be doing a few sessions with us, and the children will have the opportunity to develop many skills such as listening, following instructions,hand/eye co-ordination, communication, physical control and most importantly to have fun through physical activity. Rugby pups links in very nicely to the world cup that is currently taking place. 

We are using this as an opportunity to look at other countries and have begun to make flags of other nations to represent the wonderfully diverse children that attend Squirrels.  It is such a lovely opportunity for children to learn from each other, to hear other languages and talk about other cultures.

This week we have been noticing the signs of Autumn.  This is immediately evident every time we go into the garden and are bombarded with the acorns falling off the large oak tree.  The ground is beginning to disappear under the carpet of leaves and there is definitely an early morning chill in the air.  We have been collecting the acorns in small buckets and trying to sweep them up but there are many more yet to fall. 

Some of the children wanted to make musical shakers this week and one child had the idea of putting the acorns into a pot and covering it with paper, secured by sellotape. This made a fantastic shaker and many more of these were produced over a few days.  We added the musical instruments and had a lovely time shaking out rhythms and making music.

Leaves have been used to make leaf print pictures and the children have been mixing autumn coloured paints to add to the general feel of an autumnal scene.

Squirrels has a bug hotel in the garden and the children have enjoyed exploring this and looking around for new residents to move in.  We found a woodlouse, a worm and a few small spiders.  These were closely examined in the bug viewer before moving them into their new home.

The remote control cars have been extremely popular this week.  Children learn to control these by selecting the correct switch, controlling the movements by watching the direction that the car travels and taking evasive action when appropriate.  Turn taking has been an important part of this activity and we used our large sand-timer to make sure that the children all had a turn.  Turn taking is often quite a difficult concept for young children to understand but we encourage this through many different activities such as board games and group activities. 

Often the most fun activities are those that are created by the children themselves.  It was delightful to see a group of boys wearing pots and pans on their heads whilst they
created a game.

Words we have learned this week:

Autumn

Acorns

Rugby

Ideas to continue this weeks' fun at home:

Collect autumn leaves, twigs, acorns to make pictures.  Look at pictures of other countries and talk about what it would be like to live there.