We were all delighted to welcome the Chicks and our new starters back this week after the Christmas break. There has been lots of chatter about fun activities at home, holidays abroad Father Christmas and receiving presents!
We began our week by learning about kindness and talking about how to control our emotions. To help us with these discussions we chose the topic book Fergal is Fuming by Robert Starling. This is a story about a dragon called Fergal who is very short tempered. He burns the dinner, reduces the football goal to ashes and absolutely is unable to play a nice board game with his friends. It is only when he starts to notice other animals have clever tricks to calm themselves down that Fergal begins to win back his friends, especially when he discovers that dragons can cool off in a very handy way.
This was a great book to open up conversations about our emotions and we discussed things that make us angry and sad and what we can do to calm down.
Our Role Play area this week was set up as a home corner and the Chicks were busy tending to the home by sweeping, hoovering, washing and cooking. It was lovely to watch the children interact with each other taking turns and acting out scenarios from home.
It has been wonderful to continue our learning outside and the Chicks have been busy making cakes, soup and pasta in the mud kitchen. The Orange Chicks also had fun making sandcastles in the sandpit.
In our Literacy Activity this week the children continued to explore emotions through sound and musical instruments by listening to the different sounds the music makes. We discussed which sounds made us feel happy and which sounds made us feel sad. The children concentrated extremely well while listening to a variety of Classical music and enjoyed playing their instruments along to the music.
One on this week’s highlights was our Physical activity. After reading our Topic Story Fergal is Fuming the children had a go at blowing feathers and pom poms using straws. This exercise was very good at strengthening the muscles in their mouths which will support them in developing their speech and everyone enjoyed pretending to be Fergal!
Some of the Small World toys the Chicks have loved playing with this week have been the farm, dinosaurs, cars and the trains. The Chicks love to build this week they enjoyed using the Duplo, Mega bocks, colours blocks and the large foam bricks to build a variety of buildings, bridges and tall towers.
We look forward to welcoming all the children back on Monday for another fun filled week at 345.