Week commencing 23rd September - Westmeston

What a lot of rain we have had this week and what a lot of mud! But we haven't let the weather dampen our spirits, in fact we seem to have had even more fun in the wet weather!

The sun shone for our gardening club on Monday and the boys are doing a wonderful job of keeping the area tidy. This week they used spades and rakes to make it neat.

We have spent some time practising putting on our wet weather clothing, which we have needed a lot during the week. Some of our waterproof trousers can be tricky to get on, but with a little help, we can do it and we feel so proud of ourselves when we do!

There are lots of fun places to play in our Westmeston garden, but this week, one of the favourites has been a big muddy puddle that arrived with the rain. Of course it is fun to splash in but we also use our imagination to make up games - it became a hot chocolate puddle one day and we helped each other to mix it up.

"I'm putting sugar leaves in."

"This can be our stirrer."

"I've found some more mixing sticks. We can all have one now."

The rain also helped us to create some interesting artwork. We sprinkled some powder paint on paper and watched as the rain made painty splatters. It was also interesting to observe the powder paint floating down the little stream of rain water, although we had to move some worms out of the way to save them from getting painted!

The focus for the week has been moving our bodies in different ways. At Westmeston we constantly do this through cycling, scooting, tree climbing and many other activities. On Thursday, we designed an assault course using hopping, stepping and balancing. Mrs Butcher had a go as well, although she did it back to front!

The book of the week has been 'The Enormous Turnip'. We enjoyed reading different versions of the book and even one version that was called 'The Giant Carrot'.

It was fun to act out the story and pretend to pull up the turnip. We all wanted a go at being the turnip stuck in the ground!

There were all sorts of root vegetables to look at with magnifying glasses, including a turnip -which wasn't so enormous! Some of us have grown root vegetables at home and could tell the group all about digging them up from under the soil. We looked at the vegetables carefully and discussed their look, feel and smell,

"They look a bit hairy!"

"The parsnip smells really strong, like carrot."

"You can eat raw carrot. You have to peel it first."

On Wednesday, our newest Acorns member turned 2! Thank you to the birthday boy for the delicious cupcakes that you shared with us. What a treat!

The letter of the week was 'c' and we have certainly had lots of fun with something beginning with 'c'.....conkers! On Friday we made some messy pictures by rolling conkers around in blobs of paint. It made a wonderful splatter effect.

We used a palm drill to make holes in conkers and then made them into some lovely conker necklaces.

Conkers featured on our walk a lot as well. After collecting another bucket load of them from the horse chestnut trees that we passed, we then found a huge puddle where we discovered that conker shells make excellent boats. We had great fun pretending to be boats saving animals and submarines in the sea. We got very soggy though!

The rain came down heavily and despite having a lovely time catching raindrops on our tongue, we headed back to the hall to dry off.

We spent the rest of the afternoon making delicious mud cakes and when we fancied some time in the dry, we made flying birds using paper cutouts, a penny and some sticky tape. They flew well across the hall and certainly made a lot of squawking sounds!

It feels like the start of the mud season here at Westmeston, so please ensure that we have plenty of spare named clothes, including socks, which can get very soggy in wellies. We hope you all dry out over the weekend!