This week our topic book was Friendship is Like a Seesaw by Shona Innes. In the story we discover that friendship is like a seesaw ride, with lots of ups and downs with the key to a good friendship being balance. As the children grow they experience different dynamics in their friendships and feelings and encouraging the children to be confident in sharing thoughts is a key part of our ethos. This book was brilliant at encouraging the children to reflect on their friendships. We discussed that sometimes one of us can feel low whilst we are happy and then we can feel low whilst others feel happy just like a seesaw goes up and down.
We also used the book to extend our vocabulary. We learned what the word balance means and discussed this in relation to friendships, talking through the ways we can balance and fix our friendships by using kind gestures and communication. For our Art activity the children created seesaws and they individually selected animals they wanted to draw using felt tip pens. In their drawings we encouraged the children to practise paying attention to the details in each animal and to discuss all of their different features.
During Focus Time we continued our conversations around friendships by discussing feelings, actions and consequences. The children used body language and facial expressions to express their emotions and their peers tried to guess how they were feeling.
This week our Role Play area was set up as a Doctors’s Surgery and the children thoroughly enjoyed using stethoscopes to listen to each other’s hearts and giving each other injections and medicine to cure them back to health. Many of the children expressed that they would like to become "baby doctors" so we decided to extend their play by introducing the babies and dolls into the Role Play Area. The children pretended to be mothers holding their babies in the waiting room and it was lovely to see the children acting out experiences from home.
During our Outdoor Learning Day we extended the children’s interest in measurement by measuring natural objects using cardboard rulers. They really enjoyed this activity and it was brilliant to see the children working as a team to measure long branches, tree trunks and sticks.
We continued our learning in the Outdoor Learning Environment where by challenging the children to a driving activity! We built a road and challenged the children to see if they could drive the bubble cars and tricycles along the path. This was a brilliant activity to develop the children's spatial awareness and to encourage them to challenge themselves. This activity was a great hit amongst the children who enjoyed driving along the road carefully to avoid bumping into the sides.
For our Practical Life activity our focus was on independence and self care. We practiced putting on our coats, socks and shoes, buttoning up our smocks and zipping up our coats. The children were very excited about this activity and we had lots of discussion about the importance of persevering when challenges occur and learning that overcoming these are an important part of growing up. This linked to our aim of supporting the children in their transition to primary school and was a great opportunity to boost the children’s confidence, independence and physical development by using real life tasks that are imbedded in their everyday life.
We had another fun and busy week and we are looking forward to new challenges and learning opportunities ahead of us!
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