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This Week in Woodlands
The weeks are whizzing past us, aren’t they? One reason we strive to offer your children as much as we can each week – new experiences, new skills practice, new knowledge, situations for deepening their friendships and of course, fun.
This week has seen our Orange Class children really engaged in role play and dressing up. We always offer them the resources and time to role play but this week we have further enhanced the opportunities. Role-play in the Early Years setting allows the children to undergo cognitive, emotional and physical as well as language development. Role play is a fun, creative and safe way to express themselves and their current ideas. As their teachers, we will play alongside them to model how to role play and adopt various characters. It is also a purposeful way for them to try out their early mark-making and writing skills. We see how motivated your children are to put on their costumes and engage with their friends in pretending to be someone else, behind the costume. Without realising it they are learning skills they will need in the real world, such as negotiation, teamwork, cooperation and persuasion. They are also improving their fine motor skills as they dress up, taking garments off, pushing their arms in, pulling dresses over their heads and changing their footwear. Wigs are a favourite too! Have a look at the photos below:
Last Friday, we all learnt about Chinese New Year from Jasper’s mum, Danfen, and Grandad John. The children learnt that this is the year of the rabbit. and how families all around the world celebrated on 22nd January. Danfen told us how it is important to clean the house before the celebrations and that red is a colour that brings good luck and scares away ‘Nian‘, the mythical dragon. After the new learning we got creative and enjoyed creating Chinese Rabbit drums, painting cherry blossom trees and using gold paint to make hand prints on lucky red paper as well as writing Chinese numbers and playing in a large tray of RED dried rice, (which took us ages to sweep up!)
Children in our Green Class have been learning lots about the Earth, this week. We have enjoyed watching videos from all over the world, that Green Class families have shared with us – the children were so excited to listen and learn some new facts about the various countries. We also read a book called “Flat Stanley” about a boy who gets sent in an envelope to a different country. We decided we would make Flat Stanleys and send them to our families all around the UK and the world! We hope you Green Class Families will send your Flat Stanleys off, because we’re looking forward to some replies!
Green Class also learned about how to look after our Earth, our oceans and our land, putting this learning into practice on Tuesday on a litter-picking exercise around the School grounds.
In Maths lessons this week, our N1 children have focused their learning on the book ‘Ten Little Aliens’. They have been counting aloud to 10 and counting objects and actions, including jumping along an alien number line! They have used shapes to build spaceships for the aliens and splatted the alien numbers with fly swatters – active learning like this is always much enjoyed by our youngest pupils.
Our N2 children have been exploring the grounds to learn and use directional language. We were very impressed when some children were able to use ‘left’ and ‘right’ on our first walk out. The children helped teacher Sophie by directing her forwards, backwards and sideways to navigate their way to the Main School and back. We then used a simple map and photographs to try to recreate the journey we had taken – this used a different skill set from counting and recognising numbers, but equally as important for real-life application. Are you brave enough to ask your child to be your sat-nav this weekend?
Thank you to all the family members who joined us for our now regular, ‘Special Adult in the House’ event, this week. It is so wonderful for your children to share their Woodlands’ experiences with you and we can tell that you love seeing them in action too. We hope you enjoyed playing Bingo in French and making Flat Stanleys!
Happy weekend Woodlands children and families!
Shirley Hayman
Head of Woodlands Nursery
Notices
Thread Worms
Thread worms are a common and rather unpleasant complaint. It has come to our attention that some Woodlands children are currently affected. Please see the attached School Nurses’ Advice Sheet for advice on how to treat them. Keep yourself worm free by washing your hands with warm soapy water after using the loo and especially before eating.
