This week our topic was The Koala Who Could by Rachel Bright. The book is all about a little koala who does not like leaving his tree because he does not like change. All of his friends try to convince him to come down the tree but he never does. One day a woodpecker starts pecking on the tree which creates a big hole and the tree falls down! Suddenly as the koala lands on the ground he realises that change is not so bad after all and his friends were right, coming down the tree was fun and he wasn’t lonely anymore. The children enjoyed listened to this story and it offered a great opportunity for us to talk about the things that we like and didn’t like. It was also a great opportunity for the children to share their thoughts, worries and to reassure each other.
During the week construction activities were very popular amongst the children including constructing with the soft foam blocks and Duplo. It was lovely to see the children working together to build various houses, towers and different models.
Our Messy and Mark-Making tables continued to be busy throughout the week with children painting pictures, drawing animals with stencils and cutting them out with scissors and creating models with modelling clay. The children also had a lot of fun using scissors to cut playdough which encouraged them to practise their cutting skills and to strengthen their hand muscles.
Our construction table was also popular and the children practised the safe use of tools whilst deconstructing a printer! This deconstruction activity encouraged them to persist with the activity and to challenge themselves whilst practising risk taking and safety. On our Outdoor Learning Day the children enjoyed creating nature faces by drawing faces on cardboard before adding hair using leaves, sticks and other natural materials. This was also a lovely extension from our Self-Portrait painting from previous weeks.
In our second activity the children worked together to build a story with the puppets they had created on previous weeks. They enjoyed using their imagination, taking turns to add to the story and to take their story into the wooded area and extend it by engaging with the nature around them.
We took inspiration from our topic book in Science where we looked at gravity. We discussed what gravity is, where it comes from and how it works. Some children explained what gravity is by saying: ”There is no gravity in the Moon so people float, but there is gravity in Earth that pulls you down so people don’t float.” What a great explanation! To demonstrate what gravity is we dropped different items from our climbing frame to see which items fell faster and slower. The children were very interested in this topic and they had lots of fun experimenting with dropping items and watching them fall!