This week we have considered road safety, in line with national road safety awareness week.  We have used the craft table to explore traffic lights and road signs, talking about what these mean and exploring the different shapes; circles, triangles and rectangles.  Our small world cars, garages and ramps have been popular, and in the garden we have used our bikes and trikes alongside road signs and a zebra crossing! 
 
The story of the Three Little Pigs has been popular – last week we read this story at the children’s request, so this week we have extended this further by setting up a story scene within our tuff tray.  Some children acted the story out, first building our straw house, and then huffing and puffing to blow the house down!  Others simply enjoyed playing with the animals and added lions, tigers and elephants too!  We also used chalks to create our own masterpieces within the tuff tray.
 
The children are still feeling inspired by the autumnal leaves falling.  Our trees are almost bare now – so the children have been sweeping and collecting leaves all week.  We observed some lovely team work to collect leaves on Wednesday – with children working together to fill their wheelbarrows and pots and collect the leaves together within a large wooden planter in the garden.
 
Feeling inspired by the leaves, we tried a new printing technique at the craft table.  We bound together a bundle of cotton buds and used these to print a leaf like image on to a trunk.
 
We’ve been busy getting ready for our nativity, practicing our songs every day – the children are getting more confident with the words, but please remember to sing these at home too!
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:  Road safety is so important; take a walk with your child and discuss how to cross a road – finding a safe place and making sure they always safely hold a hand.  Look for road signs and see whether you can identify shapes, numbers or colours. Look at all the different vehicles on the road; cars, bikes, buses, vans – can you count them?

This week the children have been busy baking for our ‘Children In Need’ cake sale.  We’ve had fun measuring and mixing ingredients, spooning the mixture into cases, and then adding icing and ‘Pudsey spots!’  The finished results looked delicious and helped raise lots of money for this great charity (we’ll let you know exactly how much we raised next week!).  We also made our own Pudsey ears that we could wear and had fun cutting out clothes to dress Pudsey!
 
As well as Pudsey, we’ve also explored plenty of other ideas this week – some of which were inspired by our favourite stories!  On Monday we shared the story, ‘Stick Man’, this inspired the children to find sticks and make their own stick men using pipe-cleaners and googly eyes!   We re-visited this activity on Wednesday using one of our tuff trays with sticks, pipe-cleaners and eyes, as well as chalk images of Stickman and his family tree!  The children were most inspired by the chalks and set to work creating their own chalk images – we then added in our small chalk boards and took them outside to continue our creative fun!  Other popular books this week have included; ‘Chapatti Moon’, ‘Bear under the Stair’, ‘Shark in the Park’, ‘Little Rabbit Foo Foo’ and ‘Three Little Pigs’. 
 
Animals have been particularly popular this week.  Many of the children asked for animals and we had an array of lions, tigers, elephants and crocodiles across the setting.  This seemed like a good opportunity to introduce our new focus story ‘Dear Zoo’ – exploring all of the animals the zoo sent and why they were unsuitable as a present (too big, too tall, too scary!).  We will re-read this focus book lots over the next few weeks - by revisiting a story, the children become familiar with it and can start to join in with it and even come up with their own ideas of how to change the story and make it their own.
 
The craft table remains popular.  We tried some new techniques this week; we dipped string into paint and then folded our paper before pulling the string out – this led to some interesting shapes!  We then re-visited a favourite activity of bubble painting; the children blew through straws into a watery paint solution with a little washing up liquid, they then took prints from their bubbly stew!  We’ve also explored colour mixing – adding powder paint to water and seeing what colours result.  We added tea spoons to help fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination too.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:  Where a book is popular, we often try and extend this by setting up story props, acting out stories, or baking foods that link with a story. What is your child’s favourite story?  Could you find story props at home and make story telling more hands-on? Maybe bake Chapattis like the one in Chapatti Moon, or make toilet roll pigs and a wolf to act out 3 Little Pigs?

It’s been a busy week with regard to events, festivals and celebrations.  Monday was bonfire night and many children were eager to share their experiences of having watched fireworks; providing some wonderful opportunities to observe communication and language.  We attempted to recreate these fireworks at the craft table using techniques including a cut toilet roll tube, printing with a cut orange, and using chalks and paint brushes.  It is always our aim to teach the children a technique, but to then encourage them to then create their own masterpieces.  A great example of this was when the children were printing with the cut oranges; some of them experimented with squeezing the orange which then caused the juice to make the colours on their page run… this added the very pleasing effect of looking like shooting fireworks!
 
Fireworks are also a prominent part of Diwali, the Hindu festival of light.  We were delighted to have someone come in and share their experiences of Diwali this week; reading us the story of Diwali, showing us some authentic  diva lamps, sharing an image of a rangoli design, and offering us all a bindi to wear.  This inspired us to have-a-go at making our own diva lamps using air-drying clay.  We also tried to create our own rangoli designs from coloured blocks, chalks and pencils. On Friday we attempted a Diwali inspired recipe known as ‘barfi’ using coconut and condensed milk.  As the children mixed the ingredients they were encouraged to add a wish for the year ahead… we had wishes for being princesses, living in Jurassic Park, being a dinosaur, as well as a wish for living in a shed with a hole in the roof!!
 
Our final event this week was looking forward to Remembrance Day. Children are often aware that people are wearing poppies and are curious as to why.  We feel our children are too young to understand about the concept of war, but we did discuss the importance of remembering people and how we use poppies to do this.  We shared a short animation that CBeebies has produced that shares the story of a rabbit as he hides when hearing ‘bangs’ but then comes out as the sun shines and the poppies grow. 
 
As well as focusing on different events, we’ve still enjoyed our usual routines.  Jolly Jo this week really focused on listening to instructions as we added prepositional language such as under and over.  The children also asked for their daily mile where we do laps of the garden.  This week we’ve been butterflies, ladybirds, dinosaurs and lions!
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home: Why not watch the CBeebies poppy animation together with your child? This helps form a basic understanding of remembrance that will be built upon as they enter school and beyond.

This week there was lots of interest in water play, so we chose to use the water tray in the garden and added boats, ducks and fishing nets!  To try and guard against getting too wet in the cooler autumnal weather, children wore waterproof capes… although for those who didn’t want to get wet at all, we also had pirate ships indoors using our silver foil tuff tray insert as the water.
 
Wednesday was Halloween – some of the children were excited to share their experiences of this, telling us how they’ve helped decorate pumpkins and were planning to dress up and get sweets!  For us, Halloween is simply an excuse to explore some science fun!  We mixed ‘potions’ in our mud kitchen pots (corn flour, water and food colouring to make gloop) and explored a spider web full of green spaghetti and spiders!  We were also inspired by our black playdough – with pipe-cleaner ‘legs’ and plenty of googly eyes!
 
Junk modelling has been popular again, we encourage children to think about the supplies they need (whether it’s a cereal box, toilet roll tube or lolly stick!), and then support them as they glue, tape, paint and model their masterpieces!  It may seem like a pile of ‘junk’ – but when you ask them about their designs you may find they’ve crafted a castle, a rocket, or a TRex!
 
On Friday we introduced a new technique at the craft table - using straws to blow blobs of paint!  As well as creating some interesting shapes, this is also a great oral exercise to strengthen muscles that aid speech and language. 
 
This week we have been discussing our ‘Golden Rules’ with the children.  It is important that children learn how their action can impinge on others in an age-appropriate way, so we came up with four easy to remember ‘rules’ – at Squirrels we use our listening ears, nice words, kind hands and walking feet (indoors… we can run in the garden!)
 
Finally, we’ve been to the hairdressers this week!  The children have been busy washing, combing and styling our styling heads!  They’ve been inspired looking through hair themed books which they were able to ‘read’ as they sat in the waiting area!
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home: 
It’s not too late to enter our autumn challenge – can you go on a nature walk and find autumnal finds?  We have had some amazing entries so far! As you walk, you can talk about the colours, the falling leaves, the acorns and conkers… autumn provides so many opportunities to explore!