This week’s topic book was Ten Little Monkeys by Michael Brownlow. In this book we join ten little monkeys as they swing through the jungle, getting up to all sorts of mischief! On their journey we discover all types of different animals including elephants, lions, giraffes and meerkats! We chose this book because the children love counting songs and rhymes and regularly request stories to be read involving counting. The children had lots of fun following the monkeys on their cheeky adventure and learning about numbers, counting and rhyming along the way.
We continued with the theme of monkeys in Art where the children had the opportunity to free-paint their own monkeys. As their paintings progressed they started to turn into alien monkeys with numerous eyes and some added family members too. We also focused on developing on our cutting skills to make collages with the monkeys depicted in our book.
As our topic book focused on monkeys we used our Maths Focus Time to concentrate on counting different groups of monkeys. The children focused on counting other objects as well as number recognition. Whilst working with objects in Maths, such as counters and compare-bears, some of the children demonstrated a good ability to count to ten (and beyond), and then count back down to one.
During literacy, the children recapped the different sounds we know whilst others enjoyed playing the ‘What’s in the bag?’ game. We had lots of fun naming and describing a range of wild animals that were in the bag.
In Cookery the children made fruit kebabs. They peeled and sliced a range of fruit independently before threading them carefully onto a bamboo skewer. We discussed the different colours and made platters with the fruit pieces on our stick. We also used this opportunity too discuss then different tastes and textures of the fruits we were using.
All of the groups have continued to visit Wandsworth Common and the surrounding areas regularly and we have enjoyed using the our outside environment to extend our learning. Yellow and Orange Chicks had fun completing their Drama session on the common where they had to pretend to be different wild animals; using movement and body language to try to move their bodies in the same way as the different animals. The Green Chicks ventured out to observe the signs of Spring and the Pink Chicks had a session focusing on their fine and gross motor skills. They made bark rubbings on paper attached to a large tree trunk and played running games which involved them avoiding obstacles.
