This week the Chicks loved our topic book Bob and Flo: Hide and Seek by Rebecca Ashdown. The story is all about a little penguin called Bob who arrives at nursery with an idea to start a game of Hide and Seek! Bob gets his friends to join in but we soon realise that his hiding skills need a little bit of practice and he needs some help in understanding how to play. The book offered a great opportunity to teach us how to play hide and seek and allowed us to explore themes such as friendship, resilience and problem solving. We particularly enjoyed following Bob’s perseverance in trying finding the best place to hide and loved discussing some of the best hiding places we had found too.
We took inspiration from our topic book to continue our learning about animals. In Science we discussed the different features and characteristics of penguins as well as what they need to survive and where they live. We introduced the word 'habitat' and discussed what this meant and worked together to try and think of the different habitats that exist. We discovered that penguins live in cold habitats where there is lots of ice and sea water.
We extended our learning about habitats in the messy tray where the children loved exploring ice and chiselling the trapped penguins out of the icebergs and experimenting with the melting process. We discovered that ice melts quickly when we put it in warm water or when we hold it in our hands. However we also observed that when we held ice, it made our hands very cold.
In Art the children collaborated and worked together to create 3D icebergs from a range of materials including bubble wrap and tin foil. They experimented with the different materials and noticed that the materials made different noises when they were scrunched up. We had a lot of fun during this activity and it was a great opportunity to encourage the children to be creative in their handling of the materials and to experiment with what different shapes and forms they could make. On Wednesday during Cookery we continued with a focus on Arctic habitats by making delicious ‘snowy’ milkshakes with bananas.
We have continued to explore Anima Phonics with the children in our Literacy Focus Time and the Green Group particularly enjoyed playing the magic bag game where we focused on objects beginning with the letter 's'. It was lovely to watch the anticipation on the Chicks' faces as they pulled their objects out of the bag and their enthusiasm for making the ‘s’ sound and copying the actions was wonderful to see.
During Maths the children had an opportunity to explore positional language and continued to develop their counting skills. We adapted the “Five Little Ducks’ song to “Five Little Penguins’ and had lots of fun counting the penguins and focusing on ‘one less’ from any given number.
We are very proud of all the children for participating enthusiastically on our Outdoor Learning Day where they followed instructions beautifully and stayed safe by holding onto the rope and remaining within our safety zone while out on the common. Once we arrived at the common the Green Chicks set off to collect sticks for our campfire and created geometric shapes with them. We observed the changing environment and noticed how lots of leaves have started to fall off the trees. We could see that there were lots of different types of leaves on the ground and set to work on an activity to search for different coloured leaves to match them to our sample cards!