30/11/2020

It’s the end of November and the beginning of the build up to Christmas. We’ve planned lots of Christmas activities this month and the elf has come to visit…. getting up to mischief as I’m sure you have seen by now.

Our rooms have been transformed into Christmas wonderlands, with decorations, lights and pretty trees that the children have been decorating while listening to Christmas music. The book corners are now cosy Christmassy igloos, filled with books focussed on winter and Christmas.

The tuff trays were filled with coloured sand for mark making and festive stencils to copy. We kept the mud tray as this is a favourite with the children, they love to transfer the mud, filling and emptying the trucks and diggers.

Using the weighing scales, the boys and girls have been experimenting which things are heavy or light and which weigh the same.

Using our fine motor skills to work the tweezers, we matched pom poms into the correct coloured holes in a Christmas tree shaped box.

Using our gross motor skills we danced with the scarves, making patterns in the air and watching them float down to the ground. When we put them over our eyes it made everything turn a different colour.

This week we created lots of Christmas crafts. It was fun to make Christmas trees using triangles, we also got to write our letters to Santa. The elf has been very mischievous, first he drawed over all the ladies photos, then he was making snow angels on the table. He did read a lovely story to some dinosaurs, wonder what he will get up to next week….

The best part of all this week was on a very chilly Friday it started to SNOW!!! Most of the children had never seen snow before so we quickly wrapped up warm and went into the garden. It was so pretty, the snow flakes landed on our hair and our coats, but they melted when we tried to catch them in our hands. The wind was very cold meaning we couldn’t stay outside too long, once inside we sat and watched the snow from the window.

Autumn 23/11/2020

Another week has flown by at St Helen’s, time sure does fly when you are having fun. Heres what we’ve been up to…..

The week started off really really loud and noisy…. because we made some musical instruments using different bottles and objects to put inside. We experimented with different sounds, loud and quiet and predicted which objects would make which sounds.

We had dinosaurs in the tuff tray, with sand and crunchy pasta to explore, and role play.

The babies (dolls) were very well looked after this week, in both rooms, getting fed their bottles, dressed, cleaned and even going on the potty.

There were shape drawings, colour mixing with the paints, flour messy play, mud, mud and more mud, drawing on the light board, more amazing cutting skills, more amazing line drawings, we had some fabulous buildings created, and some children even drawed around each other when laying on the floor to measure and talk about sizes.

For exploring numbers this week, we played board games, built a cake tower, popcorn game, supermarket game, sorting dinosaurs and animals, jigsaws, and we read lots of stories.

Using our fantastic binoculars we made, some children went on a bear hunt… can you spot any bears???

A very special light arrived last week, a starry light. With the main lights off, blinds closed and some relaxing ocean music, we laid on the mats and listened while watching the lights on the ceiling and around the room. Everybody felt so relaxed and calm afterwards.

A child’s mental health is just as important as their physical health.

Halloween 12/10/2020

What has happened to our rooms this week?? Big cobwebs, spiders, bats, pumpkins and all things Halloween.

What a week filled with lots of Halloween activities! Here’s some of them….

Playdough – using grey and black playdough to make spiders. With pipe cleaners, lollipop sticks and googley eyes to decorate.

Pumpkins – we decorated them, explored the pulp, filled one with jelly, hammered pegs into them, looked at differences in the pumpkins, big/small/color/weight.

Apples are great for paint printing, ours looked like mini pumpkins. We made bats to hang around our room, then we took them outside in the wind. We also made spider webs, using gloopy glue and white paint.

The children in orange room were brave to put their hands inside the Halloween feely box, and describe what they could feel inside.

Yellow room have been reading room on the broom, and in the garden made a broomstick using sticks and string.

When the sun came out, our Halloween decorations made some fantastic shadows on the blinds.

Harvest 05/10/2020

This week we’ve learned all about the harvest festival.

We explored vegetables, potatoes, sweetcorn, broccoli, and we tasted some sweetcorn and other sweet and sour foods.

In the garden we made mud pies, jumped over the tyres, created our own farm delivery, using the wheelbarrow to transport our veg.

Keeping with the theme of harvest we added the vegetables to our messy play, using them to make prints in playdough and paint. Rubbing leaves was so much fun.

When the weather was bad, we brought the stepping stones and tunnel indoors.

This is our current favourite song to dance to … https://youtu.be/2UcZWXvgMZE