This week we continued with our Christmas topic. The children have started to have a stronger understanding about the topic and are now confident in talking about the Nativity characters including Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the three Kings and the Shepherds. They are also able to independently recount the Nativity story by looking at the pictures in our Nativity topic book.
This week our Role Play area was set up as a Construction Site. The children were busy building, hammering and fixing houses as well as taking inspiration from our Nativity story to make stables and barns for Baby Jesus. They enjoyed extending this in Free Play by using the building blocks to balance the shapes on top of each other. It was a big highlight for some children to create tall towers of bricks before taking great excitement in watching them fall down! During these activities the children used their numerical skills to count and compare the size of the different bricks they were using.
In Maths we re-visited 2D shapes and learnt some of the names for 3D shapes. We also continued our focus on matching numerals to quantity. We did this through a Christmas themed activity where we the children matched a series of numbered Christmas characters to the same numbered train carriage.
We continued with Christmas themed Cookery this week where the children learnt how to make Mince Pies. They worked together to chop lots of dried fruit (apricot, dates, raisins) before mixing them together with jam. Once all the ingredients were mixed together the children used their hands and rolling pins to roll out the dough and used the different shaped cutters to make circles for the base and the stars for the top.
In the Outside Learning Environment, the children have been busy playing with water and bubbles in the Mud Kitchen, practising their hand eye coordination to pour, spoon and mix the water in various containers.
The children have also been entranced by our outside wormery where they have enjoyed observing and describing the different bugs they could see. We were able to extend conversations and our vocabulary of bugs in the classroom by setting up the toy bugs on the table. It was lovely to see the children's language developing, with a range of descriptive words being used including, ‘wiggly’, ‘crawly’ and ‘slimy’.
On Wednesday we went for our weekly nature walk on the common. This week we set the children the task of working together to build a ‘stable’ for Baby Jesus. We began by collecting large sticks and branches before carefully leaning sticks and branches against a tree branch. The children were all involved and supported each other. They helped each other find the sticks and talked to each other about which sticks were 'good' or not. We discussed 'long' and 'short' in the process too.
When the ‘stable’ was complete we acted out the Nativity story. We had Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus sitting in the stable. The shepherds and Kings arrived not long after to bring presents for Baby Jesus. The children used their imagination when we were talking about presents to think about what presents Baby Jesus might like. They children discussed that they thought Baby Jesus would like some cars and a tractor to play with, some baby shoes and jeans as well as some milk and pasta for dinner. The children also practised balancing on the log and had fun climbing on the trees.
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