Week Commencing 2nd October 2017 - Westmeston

We had a lovely start to the week when we walked up to St Martin’s Church with our Harvest offerings. We enjoyed looking at the beautiful dahlia flowers that decorated the church and saw a really large loaf of bread that looked like a plait! We sniffed the flowers and talked about the fruit and vegetables that were at the altar. Donations went to St Peter and St James Hospice. Thank you!

We are still enjoying the story of The Enormous Turnip as we talked about vegetables being

harvested, the different sizes and most of all – teamwork. How many people/animals did it take to pull that turnip out of the ground? We coloured in figures and stuck photos of our faces on top of them, it looked like we were the ones pulling the turnip out! The older children were set the task of rewriting The Enormous Turnip. They drew pictures, typed the story on the laptop, edited, redrafted and then printed it. It looked great!

We had a good look inside a laminator when it got

jammed. We discovered that we needed screwdrivers to get inside it and there were all sorts of parts that turned around.

We made scones with Mrs Hilton. We helped to measure and mix.

We carried on with the talk about spiders and most of

us are getting really good at naming the different webs that spiders make. There was a hammock web, an orb web and a lacy web. We looked at pictures of webs and tried to spot them when we were outside. Miss Vincent knows an awful lot about spiders! We practised weaving on a spider’s web (not a real one) and it looked amazing.

We did an experiment with vegetables and at the beginning of the week we put some cut vegetables in water. By the end of the week the spring onions were starting to grow!

We helped to make a really cool light box. We lined a

plastic storage box with foil and tissue paper. It lit up when we put lights inside. We explored glow in the dark spiders and coloured bugs.

There are even more toadstools to be found among the trees. Lochy found some teeny tiny blue ones inside a conker! We used magnifying glasses to get a closer look. We tried hard to identify what they were called but couldn’t find them on any ID charts. They must have been very special!

We attempted to make Autumn crowns using cardboard and double sided tape. The day that we

chose was beautiful, sunny and breezy and of course we found that it was much more fun to run around with the strips of paper from the tape rather than making the crowns! We made different ones out of bendy twigs at the end of the week.

Although we had lots of fun playing, running and jumping, we made sure that we spent some time just enjoying the sights and sounds of Autumn. We shut

our eyes and listened to the wind, birds and aeroplanes. We felt the sunshine and the wind on our faces. It was lovely. We saw and heard lots of bees feeding on the ivy flowers growing up a tree, we could hear them buzzing around as they fed on the nectar. It felt like summer! It was quite nice to see daisies and dandelions flowering too. The insects are having a lovely late season treat.

There are still so many conkers around. As at our Lindfield setting we didn’t realise that there are so many things that we could do with them. Our favourite thing is drilling holes in them and threading them on to sticks – like kebabs! We are mindful of the fact that many animals rely on the conkers for food and luckily there are plenty to go round.

We hope that you have a lovely weekend. See you next week!