Week commencing - January 25th Westmeston

This week we have focused on moving and handling. This is something that we do in our everyday play at Westmeston: scooting, climbing, cycling, running and walking in our wonderful natural environment.

As well as practising our large gross motor movements, we focused on smaller fine motor skills by threading beads to make necklaces. This is an excellent activity to strengthen little fingers and encourage good hand eye coordination.

We have been busy playing some fun phonics games recently. We are encouraging the children to listen carefully to the initial sound in words. This week, we listened to the ‘p, p, p’ sound – ‘Popcorn Popping p,p,p!’ We played a game of ‘Silly Soup’ to help the children identify the sound ‘p’ – can you see what we put into our soup?

Every Thursday, Miss Matthews sings a wonderful 'Letter of the Week' song to help us practise our sounds. Music is such a fun and engaging way to learn.

On Tuesday, we headed out into the garden for a winter scavenger hunt. Some of the things we had to look out for were: fungus, berries, an evergreen tree and a leaf skeleton. Unfortunately some very heavy rain made the search much trickier, but the children persevered with soggy tick sheets and spotted lots of interesting things! We even found some fungus up a tree!

The leaf skeletons were very tricky to find, maybe because of the heavy rain, but we found a few and were able to look at them more closely on the lightbox.

However, during our Friday walk we spotted lots of beautiful, complete leaf skeletons! We wondered why we were able to find so many on our walk but not in the Westmeston garden. Was it because of the types of leaves, or the soil, or insects?

We had lots of muddy fun in the garden throughout the week. The children enjoyed playing with building blocks and sea animal toys.

We also celebrated a 4th birthday this week, with pass the parcel and cake! Yummy!

On Friday, the children had a go at painting some rocks. They used lovely colourful designs and some children even managed to write their names on the rocks. We love the concentration on their faces!

During our Friday walk we stopped for a snack at the cricket pavilion and had a go at running all the way around the edge of the cricket pitch. It was further than it looked, but the children showed good stamina and had lots of fun along the way.

Back in the Westmeston garden, we constructed a zip wire for some of our soft toys to travel down. There was a lot of planning, discussion and adapting as the children suggested ways to improve the zip wire and make the teddies travel faster.

Some children then used the rope to make a spider's web around the log circle. As you can imagine, there were lots of Spiderman role play games played in the web!

We've had another fun filled, action packed week and we hope for more of the same next week when our focus will be reading.