Westmeston - Week Commencing 26th September

This week at Westmeston we concentrated our efforts on Moving and Handling under Physical Development. We also had lots of fun around the story of Cinderella. On Monday the children started to make a castle out of recycled cardboard complete with a drawbridge! Modifications to the castle continued all week.

Later on in the week the children transformed their scooters and bikes into horses with a little help from the grown ups!

We tried our balancing skills on ropes and planks in the woodland area.

Miss Edwards led the children into some interesting science experiments with bicarbonate of

soda and vinegar and finally got the volcano they had made together to erupt! Later the children used pipettes to make their own mini eruptions as they squeezed vinegar on to bicarbonate of soda to see what happened! They then tried water to see if it would react the same.

We made our own moon sand with flour and oil which Mrs Vincent brought in and we mixed it up with our hands. It was great to build with and the children combined it with mud, grass and other ingredients by the end of the day! Using palm drills to make holes in the conkers we made wands and the children had great fun trying to make magic spells to turn each other into frogs and other animals. We saw squirrels, sheep and a buzzard. There were lots of insects too. We saw flies, bees, wasps and ladybirds. Throughout the week Mrs Hilton helped the children to use jewels and sequins to make very royal crowns indeed! By Thursday we were making shields as well.

On Friday we went to the woods. We asked the older children what was different about the woods now that the seasons were changing. One child said that there “was no mud!” Such disappointment! There was mud but it was covered up by a crunchy layer of leaves. It was a wonderful afternoon and the journey took a very long time because of the exploring to be done along the way.

Later on the children sorted through blackberry and hawthorn berries that Mrs Booth had already collected to make an autumn jam. The hawthorn berries are a really important food

source for birds and other animals so she made sure that she only picked a few. We tasted this later as a snack with some bread.

We reminded the children through instruction and storytelling about the dangers of picking berries.

We were lucky to have Miss Nagy from Lindfield come to play with us on Friday and she had a lovely day playing with the children. The children played with some very strange instruments that she had in her special bag.

Next week: Understanding the World - People and Communities