The Childrens Workshop

This week we have been inspired by books! Our forest school story "Jack and the flum flum tree" sparked our imaginations and we made our very own Flum Flum tree! We also had a blast dressing up as characters for World Book Day. We discussed the magic of books and how we use our imaginations to dive into the stories! The children then made up their own stories, along with illustrations, which we will be making into a book. We even had Little Red Riding hood come into Pre-School to read to us!
In our music workshop this week, we learned all about the guitar, where it originates, the way it works and the types of music you can create with them. The children were particularly drawn to rock music, and really enjoyed getting to play the guitar by themselves!
We also made some bird feeders to hang on our fence in the garden!

Have a lovely weekend!

We have continued learning about the 7 Continents of the world this week, drawing our focus to Asia, the Buds used different media to recreate the Taiwanese flag! We will be celebrating Chinese new year next week, as well as taking a look at the variety of different cultures across Asia!

In honour of burns night, we celebrated by making our own mulled, spiced fruit drink, we enjoyed our drink whilst listening to Auld Lang Syne played on the bagpipes!

We conducted a science experiment today to see if we could create a mini version of the water cycle, using a bowl, hot water, a plate and some ice! It was lots of fun and very informative! Maybe you could recreate it at home!?

We have started reading the book 'Freddie and the Fairy' and the children decided to build their own fairy houses in the garden!

Wishing you a restful weekend!

Happy Friday!
This week, we have been looking at the different continents of the world, and the different animals and food you would find there! We used our senses to explore all sorts of exotic fruits this week, and made them into delicious healthy smoothies!
We have been reading the Winnie the Pooh book "Pooh's bees" and taking inspiration from the story, the children had fun building camp fires in the garden, to pretend to roast marshmallows on. They also recreated Eeyore's teepee house!
We are looking forward to seeing you all again next week. Have a fantastic weekend!

Welcome back! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year & we are very happy to have all of the children back with us. We are also so proud of the way that our new Buds and Saplings have settled in!

We kicked off our Forest School activities this week, starting with the Gruffalo, and exploring the homes of different woodland animals. We explored a real birds nest and then had a go at making our own! We have also been tracking animals in our garden, searching for evidence of animal activity, such as footprints and droppings!

We were excited this week to see the first signs of spring, new shoots of flowers are popping up around our garden!

We also worked together to chop, mix and blend to make healthy fruit smoothies, they were absolutely delicious and thoroughly enjoyed! The children were so proud of their smoothies that they raised a glass!

Have a fantastic weekend, we look forward to seeing you all again next week!

We have had great fun this week exploring the story of 'The three Billy goats gruff" where we have been re-enacting the story using different props and wooden animals, aswell as playing the characters ourselves! The children worked hard building their own bridges and using these cues to make up their own stories!

We continued our cooking workshops which is all developing our hand eye coordination, maths (measuring), cutting, team work as well as waiting our turn. We have continued discussing the importance of personal hygiene, particularly when handling food!

We continued talking about those we love and those who love us, the children shared photos of their family with each other and it was delightful to hear them talking about their loved ones!

We are wishing you all a fantastic weekend!

We have been following the story of 'The three little pigs' for our forest school topic this week, and the children have been working together to build houses from straw (shredded paper), sticks, and blocks and acting out the story together. Anticipating what comes next and working together to develop a narrative!

During circle time discussions this week, we have been talking about Love, how it feels and why we feel it, we spoke about all of the people who love us and how it makes us feel to know that we are loved, and how we show love to others.

This week we made our very own 'Carrot and courgette muffins' the children all measured, chopped, grated, and mixed the ingredients and they turned out wonderful, we hope they will be enjoyed at home! We will be making some more next week.

We hope you all have a lovely weekend!

This week, we have been looking at 'Animals who hibernate' for our forest school topic. The children had great fun making hedgehog houses, we filled boxes with things we thought a hedgehog might like in its home such as sticks and leaves. We even decorated the outside of the boxes with leaves so they would blend into their surroundings, making the hedgehogs even safer from predators. We then made adorable hedgehogs from play dough and twigs!

We also made boats, experimenting with different materials to see if they would float!

We continued developing our miniature city, adding essential services such as a school, a police station and a doctor's surgery. The children have loved role-playing with the city they built themselves, using small world people and vehicles.

Finally, we marked remembrance day and discussed with the children the meaning behind it. We made a field of Poppies to remember the soldiers and observed the 2 minutes of silence together, remembering those who gave their lives for our country.

We wish you a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing you all again next week!

For the last few weeks we have been observing different festivals, just before half term we carved and explored pumpkins for halloween, this week, we learned all about Divali (the Hindu festival of lights) and we made our own Divali candles. In anticipation of Bonfire Night we have been discussing fire safety, and after we had some great discussions about how to keep ourselves safe, we used sticks and tinsel to make our own safer versions of sparklers! We then conducted a science experiment to see if we could make fireworks using water, oil and food colouring.

We have also been doing lots of Yoga this week, the children seem to be really enjoying it and we will be continuing this throughout the year.

For our sustainable development workshop, we used junk modeling to build our very own city! Each child got to decorate their own house. We discussed the things that are essential in a community, such as hospitals and police, to keep people safe and healthy, so we added these to our city. We spoke about how we can work together to help our whole community thrive.

What a fantastic week we have had. We hope you all have a brilliant weekend and we look forward to seeing you all next week!

This week, we have been discussing our feelings and emotions, we have been speaking about what being a good friend looks like and how we can help look after each other by being considerate of each others feelings. The children were full of great questions, suggestions and ideas about this. We have also continued our discussions about keeping our bodies healthy and exploring foods. The children did a fantastic job of sorting an assortment of different foods into healthy and not-so-healthy groups. We then used some of our foods as stamps to paint with, we chopped and discussed all sorts of fruits and vegetables, discussing how and where they were grown, we then cut them through the middle to see the pattern on the inside, finally we dipped them into paint and made some lovely art!

We conducted an experiment, using paper mache to make a volcano and attempting to create an eruption using vinegar and baking soda, the volcano gushed with fizzy, frothy lava to the delight of the children.

The Buds have been reading through The Gruffalo and made their own Gruffalo's using cardboard boxes, as well as making log pile houses for a sneaky snake to live in!

We also each made our own 'Hedgehog bread" working together to measure ingredients, pour, stir, mix and knead, we hope they were enjoyed at home!

Next week, we will be making flapjacks, please bring in a *NAMED* small pot with lid for them to bring it home, thank you!

We hope you have a brilliant weekend!

What another actioned packed week!

Saplings and Buds have enjoyed being together and exploring each others rooms and playing along side each other.

We sang together our harvest songs to celebrate Harvest Festival. We would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you for all of the donations we recieved. Today they were taken to Sevenoaks Larder to be distributed and were greatly recieved.

Our cookery classes started this week, and it was beautifully linked to our healthy eating topic. On the menu this week were Fruit Kebabs. The children had the chance to chop, discuss and eat their fruit kebabs at snack time.

On the 7th we were able to celebrate National Poetry Day . We listened to many different types of poems and discussed what poetry meant. A particular favourite was a poem called "On The Ning Nang Nong" as it was a real tongue twister and we all thought it was very funny!

In Forest School, we rolled pine cones over paint on paper to produce some very creative pieces of art. We made beautiful leaf jewellery and creative robots using junk modelling.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend.

This week, we were inspired by artist Andy Goldsworthy, who makes fantastic art using nature. We looked at some of his pieces together and then created some of our own! We created our very own pirate ship using natural resources that we had foraged together.

We then made our own pirate telescopes and eye patches! We made a pirate ship out of outdoor equipment and all sailed along the sea, singing pirate songs! The childrens' imaginations went wild when we asked what they could see through their telescopes. "Mermaids, whales, treasure, Captain Blackbeard! A lighthouse" and much more!

We continued making art from natural resources, making spiders from pinecones. We then rolled the left over pinecones in paint to make patterns. Leaving us with fabulous designs on paper, as well as beautiful colourful pinecones that we will hang up around our garden!

Have a lovely weekend!

This week, we have been focussing on Healthy Eating. We have been looking at the Eatwell Guide food wheel, discussing different food groups and why we need to eat some foods much less than others to keep our bodies healthy. You should all have been sent home your own copy, do take a look at it together and discuss which foods are healthy and which foods aren't so much! The eatwell guide is something we have on display and refer to at lunch time every day, so the children will be familiar with it!

Our Buds made their very own fire engine this week using various materials!

We have also been exploring the book 'Super Worm' together, which the children have thoroughly enjoyed. We have been digging through mud for spaghetti 'worms' and spoke about all of the different things you would find under the ground (mostly litter) so we sorted all of the litter into recyclables and non recyclables and put them in the right bins.
We also had a go at making our very own miniature wormeries! We then used our wet spaghetti to do 'worm painting' and I think you will all agree our worms made a fantastic piece of art!
We also discussed some of the things that make us unique. We measured the childrens' height on the wall, and plan to do so again every term to track how much they've grown!
We spent time looking in the mirror and taking notice of our own unique features and discussed how we are all so different, yet equally special. We then had a go at our self portraits!
Have a lovely weekend,
We look forward to seeing you all again next week :)