This week our topic was ‘The Great Race’ by Emily Hiles. The book discusses the story of the 12 animals in the Chinese calendar and how the years were named after them. As the new year approaches, each animal wants it to be named after them, but no one can agree. The Jade Emperor decides there should be a race to decide the winner. The children showed great interest in discussing the animal signs of the Chinese Calendar and learning about their animal signs based on the year they were born.
We extended the children's interest in their zodiac signs our Art activity where the children painted roosters and monkeys which were their animal signs.
During Free Play the children enjoyed taking part in a range of 'Practical Life' activities. In one these activities we challenged the children to explore using the chopsticks to pick up cotton balls. Some children already had experience using the chopsticks and they were keen to share the types of food they had tried before such as sushi, dumplings and spring rolls. Although a little challenging for some, this was a great activity to support the children's fine motor skills and develop their perseverance and focus.
Our Role Play area has been set up as an International Airport this week. The children had lots of fun using their passports and boarding passes to travel to places including, the United States, Italy and the North Pole! The children showed a good understanding of the function of passports and they discussed that passports enabled them to ‘go places’. This activity sparked the children’s interest in looking at maps and the Fledglings were curious to ask their peers and teachers about where they came from and the countries they had been to. These conversations were a great opportunity to link back to our teaching of 'British Values' and our learning around the EYFS’ Culture Capital. We extended the children interest of travel in our 'Small World' area with space where the Fledglings enjoyed taking the toy aeroplanes on a range of journeys, and discussing different ways we can travel.
In the Outdoor Learning Environment the children were extremely excited by the snowy weather and enjoyed making snow angels and having snowball fights. The weather gave us the perfect opportunity to discuss risk-taking and the health and safety precautions needed during icy weather and how we can play safely whilst having fun.
During our one to one activities the children have started showing an interest in adding numbers. In response to this interest we decided to introduce basic addition and used stickers to practice adding 1+1, 1+2, 2+2, 2+3 and 5+5 and so on up to 10. The children showed a good understanding of needing to count the stickers on each side of the addition sum in order to find the total number of stickers. We also extended our measuring activity from last week by measuring lengths in different ways such as measuring chopsticks and strings and ordering them by their length.
During our Team Building activity the children played ‘Catch the Dragon’s Tail’ which is a game where the children held onto scarves to create a dragon then the head of the dragon tried to walk around ways that he/she could catch the tail without breaking the line. The children had to work together to keep the line attached and to avoid being caught.
We had a wonderful and busy first half term and we are looking forward to coming back after half term to continue our fun, play and learning.
