Week Beginning 25th September 2017 - Westmeston

We have had another fabulous week of playing and exploring outside. We have had days where we haven't had to put coats on because it has been so mild.

We have been scooping and exploring harvest fruits and vegetables including potatoes and melon. We have

been using knives, spoons and screwdrivers! We found this to be an excellent finger gym exercise. We used the screwdrivers to screw holes into a butternut squash! We had to hold the screwdrivers tightly in one hand and the screw in the other hand and make sure that we didn’t wave anything around so we had to be quite well co-ordinated as well!

We made fairy cakes with Miss Edwards using a very interesting recipe, basically, we made it up! They tasted very nice.

On another day we iced biscuits and covered them in sprinkles, they looked very pretty.

We have been sorting acorns, pine cones and conkers by size and we have been counting them too! They are very useful for simple addition and subtraction.

We designed book covers with Mrs Hilton. One of the stories was "The Snail and the Whale". "The Enormous Turnip" was another story that we were enjoying as we learned about teamwork and turnips. We acted out the story under the trees. We took it turns to be the different characters. We looked at real turnips. Ours were not enormous – they were very small!

On Friday we wondered what we could do with all of the harvest vegetables and armed with a saucepan, spoon, grater and various items of cutlery we decided that we would make a chocolate cake. Miss Vincent helped us to work out what other ingredients we would need and Mrs Booth tried to find them. We didn’t have scales to hand so we decided that we could use bowls to measure instead. The grated turnip made it interesting but most

of us really enjoyed the end result! It was interesting to see how the texture had changed. We described the cake as "Bendy" and "Squidgy" and we tried to see if we could recognise any of the ingredients in the cake when we were eating it.

The end of the week brought lots of puddles and wellies full of water. They made such a lovely squishy sound when we walked. We have of course been drilling conkers again with palm drills this time and we found that we could put sticks in the holes and make up little games. We really do like drilling holes in things!

Finally, late on Friday afternoon we got a special treat when Gerald who helps to look after the hall gave us some lovely rosy red apples that he picked from a local tree. Thank you Gerald!

Thank you for the donations of tins and cartons for the Harvest Festival collection at St Martin’s Church in Westmeston. A group of us will help to take these up on Monday. The collection is in aid of St Peter and St James Hospice. Monday Westmeston children only will be walking up to the church to see the Harvest Festival display so please make sure that we have our coats and wellies as we never know what the weather will be like.