As part of our Celebrations topic the Swans this week have been focusing on birthdays. During Language for Thinking, they have discussed their birthdays and how their parents from different countries and cultures celebrate birthdays. They have learned how different countries around the world celebrate birthday and even developing their inference skills (reading the picture) based on different birthday scenarios.

During Discovery Time the children wrote beautiful cards to Kipper, created cakes with the playdoh and candles, used their fine motor skills to cut and create birthday cakes and lots of counting to match the correct number of balloons.

The Swans did some amazing work within their Talk for Writing based on Kipper’s Birthday. They learnt the story with actions, sequenced the story, acted it out in groups and even wrote a fantastic shopping list for party things. Because of their hard work, they were all invited to Kipper’s Birthday party on Friday. They all got to experience a party with music and dancing, pass the parcel, games, singing happy birthday to Kipper and we even shared a cake!

This week the children have been focusing on understanding what bullying is and how to reach out to people who can help. We kicked off our week with Odd Socks Day. Everyone showed off their individuality by wearing odd socks. Throughout the week our continuous provision was all based on Anti-Bullying Week. We had lots of different activities including creating our own drawings of odd socks, making friendship bracelets, the roleplay house to build our good communication with our friends and group games to encourage turn taking and winning and losing with kindness.

During our Language for Thinking sessions, we learned about what a bully is and who we can speak to if we are being bullied. Also, we did a circle time where we gave each other compliments, discussing and re-enacting different scenarios.

It was also important for the children to understand that bullying can occur online too, so we watched a video from the National Online Safety website about who to talk to if we are being bullied online or something we don’t like or understand is happening online.

For Muddy Monday the children were given a variety of maths challenges such as creating shapes and collecting a given number of objects from the forest school area.

Swans have been very busy this week completing all their work and enjoying their discovery time.

For Muddy Monday this week, Swans went on a hunt for bugs. They found lots of different ones, especially as the rainy weather made it perfect for exploring.

We have also started our Healthy Me topic. This week we have focused on which different foods are good for us. In discovery time the children were able to pack a healthy lunchbox, weigh and compare different vegetables, explore and compare the different outsides and insides of fruit and vegetables and lots more.

The children have especially enjoyed this week’s ERIC challenge of finding a funny book and recommending it to a friend.