This week began our 3-part focus on Artists. We will be spending the next two weeks continuing with this theme and exploring the work of famous artists including Pablo Picasso, India Flint, Paul Klee and Van Gogh. Over the course of the topic we will learn about the artists' lives and make our own work taking inspirations from their different masterpieces. We will also explore a range of different techniques and media.
We extended our Artist topic to our Focused activities where the children looked at pictures of famous paintings and they practised using connectives to discuss what they liked about the pictures and why. When discussing Picasso's work we noticed that some images looked the same whilst in others artworks the shapes were jumbled up. We discussed that this was in the fact the difference between some images having symmetry and others having asymmetry. We explored these concepts further in Maths where the children were introduced to halving objects. The children were able to identify the meaning of whole and half and we discussed the differences between these. The children used rulers to mark the shapes in half before colouring them in.
This week the Red Group’s bubble’s Role Play area was set up as a Science Lab. The children enjoyed taking part in their own science experiments and explored magnets, mixing colours and what objects sink and float. The favourite experiment amongst the children was observing the effects of pouring and mixing coloured water together! In the Blue bubble the Role Play area was set up as a School based on the children’s enjoyment in pretending to be teachers. They particularly enjoyed taking the register and marking who was at school and who was absent. They Fledglings used whiteboards, chalkboards and numbered cards to support their play and to teach each other to form letters and numbers.
The construction materials and the DT table continue to be an active part of our Free Play where the children use their imagination and teamwork skills to work together to build different models. In the Red Group cutting and collaging activities were also very popular where the children developed their fine motor skills through cutting and sticking.
In the Outdoor Learning Environment the climbing frame is one of the children’s favourite things to explore and they always take full advantage of using it by climbing on the climbing wall as well as sliding down the slide and fire fighter’s pole. Undoubtedly the most popular activity this week was the sand pit however where the children had a sand castle competition. They used diggers to build their sandcastles and compared which sand castle was the tallest!
On Thursday our school was used as a polling station so the Fledglings spent their day in bubbles in different parts of the common. The children had a wonderful time exploring nature and playing outdoors. The Red Group created story stones whilst the Blue Group practised weaving flowers, leaves and bark on cardboard with string. Our day out created lots of wonderful learning opportunities including having discussions about how to look after our environment, recapping our knowledge of safety whilst outdoors and noting down observations of the changes which had occurred to our environment in the last week!
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