This week we spent the week learning all about Christmas. The children enjoyed listening to ‘The Nativity’ story during Circle Time where we discussed why we celebrate Christmas. The children had the opportunity to recount their understanding of the story and its chronology in Free Play, using the Nativity set as props. We discussed who Jesus was, where he was born as well as using the Nativity set to help us name the different characters in the story, including Mary, Joseph, the Shepherds and the Three Kings. This also provided a great opportunity to extend our knowledge of animals, pointing out the donkey, cows and sheep. The children enjoyed extending their curiosity by looking through the Christmas books, both independently and in groups.
During Art the children created some amazing Christmas themed masterpieces. In one of the activities the children free painted snowmen, counting the number of buttons each one had. In another activity the children displayed great focus and determination, using their fine motor skills to use shiny stickers to decorate Christmas trees with. In Music we had lots of fun practising Christmas songs for our upcoming concert. The children showed great enthusiasm and joined in with the actions with great energy!
During Cookery the children made cheesy stars of different sizes, using rolling pins and cutters. We used our mathematical knowledge to describe the differences between big, medium and small. The next day during our Maths lesson we revisited and extended our understanding of sizes by sequencing stars above the stable in order of size on our activity sheet.
This week on our Nature Walk the children practised their pincer grip by pegging a range of leaves and sticks onto a washing line. We observed and discussed the different shapes of leaves as well as counting them. To encourage the different words we can use to describe things, we talked about opposites eg. wet/dry, long/short, thin/thick, big /small and applied these words to the different natural objects we had found. When we returned to the classroom we extended our pegging activity by setting up an activity in our ‘laundry’ themed Home Corner where we children were able to peg socks on a line. The children enjoyed pegging the socks as well as pairing and counting them on the washing line too.