Week Beginning Monday 10th March

We have been very lucky again with the weather this week and the children have spent a lot of time outside in the garden.  On Monday we played ‘parties’, using leaves for food and waffle bricks for games.  One child built a bridge with the waffle bricks and drove his car round it.  This lead to talking about the importance of road safety and how green means go and red means stop.   Later on we played the ‘car’ game where we were the cars and we had to watch for the colours to change and move accordingly.We had a visit from Travis the cockerel who was very big but very tame.  Later on that morning some fluffy hens came to visit and next week we are hoping to see some new born chicks. On Tuesday we played games with the carpet shapes in the garden and we continued our story of Ringo the Flamingo.  We took turns to visit the role play hairdressers where we had our hair styled and our make up and nails done.  We were even able to dress up in some special clothes.   On Wednesday a small group came up with some lists of instructions for staff to be ‘good’.  This was great practise for handwriting skills and lots of children are now writing their own names on their pictures.  We made a start on spring cleaning the garden ready for sowing our seeds and plants.  We swept up loads of leaves and put them in bags and boxes for the compost heap. Eight children have visited Tesco this week and some of them were able to use the scan and shop facility which proved very popular.  One group bought a selection of new fruits to try for snack and the others bought some Cheerios cereal. On Thursday we started to build a water wall with the plastic bottles and lots of children got involved in looking for different size bottles and suggesting positions to place them (lots of positional language). By Friday we had read the story of Ringo the Flamingo several times and the children were able to help tell the story.  Some also put on a puppet show for their friends, using the animal finger puppets.  We have been looking at shapes around us and we searched for shapes in the coloured and scented rice.  We are also looking at ourselves and painting self portraits.  Don’t forget to look out for them on the wall in Squirrels room. See you next week for lots more learning through play.