Week commencing 12th October - Westmeston

Welcome to our weekly blog, This week our focus was expressive arts and design and the children certainly enjoyed being creative in a variety of ways.

The leaves on the trees in the garden are really starting to fall now, so we have made the most of the various colours and shapes. We used the lightbox to look at some leaves in detail. We spoke about the season of autumn and why the leaves fall form the trees.

The children got creative with leaves as well and used them to make some lovely pictures.

We created these autumnal sun catchers using paper plates, sticky back plastic and colourful leaves. They looked great hanging by the window and catching the light,

We used some of our collected conkers to create some conker rolling artwork during the week. The children selected some primary colours to add to a pot then placed in the conkers. After they had given it all a good shake around, they had created some lovely designs. It was also a good opportunity to talk about colour mixing and the new colours that had been created.

The children used their hands to create flower patterns for a special project we are creating. Some children really loved getting messy and the tickly feeling when their hands were being painted.

We were lucky enough to do some painting in the sunshine this week. We used some buckets of mud to make patterns on a large piece of paper. The children used a range of items to paint with: brushes, bikes, scooters and toy vehicles.

During our Forest School session with Paulina, the children potted strawberry plants to take home. Hopefully they will produce some delicious strawberries next summer. The children also created interest sticks - on our walk around the garden, they picked up interesting leaves, plants, feathers and pine cones to add to their sticks. One lucky child even found real treasure - a gold coin!

Last Friday, we made wormeries and this week we have been checking on them. On Tuesday we added some vegetable peelings for the worms to munch on. We also looked at some of the tracks the worms had made and discussed how worms are good 'garden helpers' because of the way they aerate the soil and add nutrients to it.

On Friday we took another look at the wormeries and decided to release our wiggly friends back into the garden so that they could carry on their good work in the soil. We were pleased to see how healthy the worms looked. We had forgotten how big some of them were!

We went on an Autumn Scavenger Hunt during our Friday walk. The children were challenged to find a yellow leaf, a conker, something bumpy, a leaf with two colours and something interesting. It was lovely to stop and look closely at things that caught our eye and be observant of the world around us.

There was a 4th birthday to celebrate during the week and we all enjoyed a piece of delicious cake!

All of us at Westmeston would like to send our love and best wishes to Mrs Butcher for a speedy recovery after her accident. All the children and staff really miss her and hope she is back soon. We hope the photographs of our week have made her smile.

It seems like this half-term has whizzed past as we begin our final week before the break. We look forward to seeing all of the children for some more Acorns fun.