Our topic book for this week was My No, No, No Day! by Rebecca Patterson. The story is all about a girl called Bella, whose day goes very wrong. From the moment she wakes up to when she goes to bed, she says, “No, No, No” until finally at the end of the day she has a story and a kiss from her Mummy with a promise of a happier, more cheerful day tomorrow. We used this book to open up conversations around our emotions and to extend our language and communication to better understand the different feelings we all experience.
During Circle Time we continued this theme to discuss our feelings and emotions exploring questions such as, “How do you feel now?” and “What makes you feel happy, sad, cross, upset?”. The children were able to extend this discussion by matching pictures representing different feelings to our Emotion Board, which we have started to use daily to communicate how we are feeling.
On our Nature Walk this week we focused on observing the changes in our outdoor environment. The children enjoyed visiting the common, looking for and collecting leaves, conkers and sticks. To extend our learning and to experiment with what we could use our outdoor resources to create we took our findings back to the classroom to use in Art and at the Mark-Making table. We used the leaves as stencils to draw around to make pictures and explored the different textures and patterns on the leaves by rubbing them with crayons.
We were also able to collect leaves from our Outdoor Learning Environment and used these in Focus Time to refine our fine motor skills, whilst practising threading activities to make leaf necklaces. We were also able to extend our fine motor skills further by using tweezers to transfer leaves and conkers from different trays.
On Friday we celebrated ‘World Porridge Day’ in support of the charity, Mary’s Meals. The children decorated their porridge with different types of fruit to make faces. This led to lively group discussions of how the children were feeling and how we could make happy/sad/ excited faces to describe our emotions.
The children are becoming increasingly confident in selecting their activities independently. Particular favourites this week have been the Montessori Knobbed Cylinders where the children have loved practising their understanding of sizing with the Broad Stairs. It has been wonderful to watch their curiosity and confidence blossom as they interact with both the indoor resources and natural world.
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