This week our topic was ‘In My Heart: A Book of Feelings’ by Jo Witek. The book discusses different emotions such as happy, afraid, silly and angry by describing how these emotions might make us feel or make us behave. It encourages the children to describe how they feel and how to use language around emotions and feelings in their vocabulary and everyday language. Throughout the week the children actively included emotions in their discussions such as:”You hurt my feelings when you said that I would like you to say sorry to me.” Or “it really makes me happy when you play with me.”
Throughout the week the children showed great interest in different messy play activities both indoors and outdoors. During these activities the Fledglings have continued to develop their physical skills independently by hammering, washing, painting and creating marks. One of the highlights of these activities was washing the babies where the children enjoyed looking after the babies and giving them their 'bath time'.
Our construction materials and stacking shapes were very popular amongst the children in Free Play. During the week the children repeatedly chose to explore how to balance the different construction materials on top of each other to make tall towers as well as building different models and structures. They also enjoyed exploring shapes whilst playing and they experimented with different ways of arranging them.
Our iPad was actively used by the Fledglings this week to take photos of each other and the toys. The children showed awareness of the importance in asking their peers’ permission to be photographed. The children experimented with taking pictures from different angles as well as from close up and from far away to observe what affect this had on their photographs.
During our Focus Time activity at the beginning of the week, the children shared their weekend news by taking turns and discussing what they had got up to. On Tuesday they explored measuring weight and discussed the differences between 'heavy' and 'light'. The children learnt about weight and weighing in mathematical terms. We extended the activity by linking the idea of weight to emotions. This supported the children in having a better understanding of feelings when they are described in different ways, for example when people have a ‘heavy heart’ or are feeling ‘down’.
In Science we extended our topic about hearts and emotions by learning about our Circulatory System. We learnt all about the heart in this activity; about what it is, what it does and how. We also discussed the function of our Circulatory System and the difference between blood and oxygen. The children created their own circulatory system as a group by working together to draw the different components of the circulatory system on a large piece of paper. They then consolidated their knowledge by working independently on their activity sheets, using red pens to represent blood and blue pens to represent oxygen.
On Friday the children played 'emotion statues' which was a slightly different version of the popular game 'musical statues'. The children danced to the music then the teacher called out an emotion which the children had to show through using body language and facial expressions when the music stopped. They also acted out different emotions based on what they had learnt throughout the week from our topic book, discussions and focus activitiess.
