What a Wonderful World by Bob Thiele was our chosen topic book this week. The book marries the very well-known song by Louis Armstrong with wonderful illustrations by Tim Hopgood and spreads the positive message of hope and love for people everywhere. The book was selected based on the children’s love of singing and music. We regularly turn our books into songs and it is always a huge success. Cows in The Kitchen, Animal Boogie, and Singing in the Rain, are a handful of the Chicks' favourites.
In keeping with the title of the book, this week we focused our activities on the beauty of the world around us. We ventured out into the community, spotting flowers, trees, squirrels and anything else the children found to be wonderful. Using iPads the children were able to photograph all the things they found and these will be displayed in our classroom next week. Each bubble made their own display. The Green Bubble made a giant rainbow, Yellow and Orange Chicks used their handprints to make a large tree and the Pink Chicks created planet Earth, using spray bottles to paint the ocean and rollers for the land.
The highlight of the week was without a doubt our World Book Day celebrations on Thursday. The children were excited to be able to bring in their favourite stories and to dress up in costumes related to them. We were very proud of all the children's amazing ideas and costumes! It was wonderful to observe the children talking about books, their favourite characters, and events. Everyone tried illustrating their favourite page from their book and we loved noticing how much our drawing abilities had progressed since September, with the Chicks starting to include more details into their pictures.
On Wednesday, the children planted seeds which we are now closely observing daily to monitor their growth. The Pink group made predictions about how long it would take for the seeds to start to grow. We decided to check on them every morning to watch their progress. We learnt what seeds need to grow, including soil, water and light.
In Art we experimented with and learnt about primary and secondary colours. The children adored mixing the colours and observing the changes that occur. The children were able to describe the change in colours and this activity provided an excellent opportunity to support children's creativity and independent thinking skills with many of the Chicks discussing what happened when certain colours mixed and why. We continued our focus on colours in our Maths focus time as well as in some of our activities during Free Play.
In other adventures the Pink Chicks were very animated this week building and designing in the Construction Role Play area. The Yellow and Orange Chicks were busy washing clothes, pegging and cleaning in the 345 launderette and the Green Chicks explored mark-making, stamping and posting envelopes in their Role Play area.