2526 Acorn and Holly week beginning 1st December
What a busy couple of weeks we have had in Acorn and Holly class! Our nativity preparations are now in full swing and we are really looking forward to sharing it with you next week. The children are making us so proud as they learn songs and words and they are performing with such enthusiasm!
Last week, we used the story ‘The Way Back Home’ to lead our learning and the children loved exploring space travel. As part of our maths lessons, we have been learning about shapes and after exploring 2D shapes, the children moved onto junk modelling, using 3D shapes to make rockets and spaceships. The children were also eager to draw and write about their own martian adventures in drawing club and had some brilliant ideas about how else they might get to the moon and who they might see there!
This week we have been reading a lovely story about friendship called ‘On Sudden Hill’. It is the story of 3 boys who use empty boxes and their imaginations to go on all sorts of exciting adventures, eventually building their own box vehicle called Mr Climbfierce! You won’t be surprised to hear that the children have made their own version in our classroom and had lots of fun playing with it and retelling the story.
In our handwriting sessions, the Holly children have been practising handwriting patterns. We do lots of finger rhymes and activities to warm up finger, hand and arm muscles ready for writing. They really enjoy these activities and it’s wonderful to see improvements in pencil control and letter shapes already. This is really supporting their writing in our phonics learning and we have been really impressed with how the children are remembering and recalling all of their sounds. The Acorn children have been really focussing on name recognition by playing lots of games, making name rockets and spotting it as often as they can, some of them are also really impressing us with writing their names.
We have been making the most of the wet weather in Forest school over the last few weeks. The children have loved making mud pies and painting using rain water. We have been observing and discussing changing weather, which was a perfect introduction for our drawing club book ‘Rain.’ The children really enjoyed the illustrations in this book, which focused on how magical reflections can be. The children were keen to find puddles on the playground, observing the reflections we could see in them. And of course, they are always excited to jump in puddles with their wellies on. We have also been observing the changing season In Forest School, Goodbye Autumn and Hello Winter. This week we have planted bulbs that we hope will grow into special presents for Spring.
We have also had two brilliant enrichment activities over these past two weeks. Last week, we had a visitor from SCARF, our PSHE program and the children loved working with Harold the giraffe to learn about staying healthy. Then this week we had a glow dodgeball session which was lots of fun and the children were brilliant when listening to instructions and working as a team. Do have a look at our photos for some pictures of both of these.
It was lovely to see so many of you at the Christmas Fayre yesterday and thank you if you came and bought one of our table decorations. The children had a lovely time choosing seasonal foliage and different decorations to make them last week. We were so proud of how carefully they worked to make them. We have a few left over and are selling them for £3 each, so do let us know if you would like one.
