Week Beginning 16th October 2017 - Westmeston

Well, it's been another very mild week. Drizzly, misty and quite spooky! We are observing how Autumn is changing the sights, sounds and smells of our beautiful surroundings. We have noticed late ladybirds flying around and the tiniest bugs in the leaves.

Our fascination with webs continues as we made spider webs with glue and made a web that we

could peg numbered spiders onto which gave us a little bit of finger gym exercise with number recognition thrown in.

We had The Acorns Hairdressing Salon running all week and all of us enjoyed styling each others hair and decorating each other with hair clips and curlers.

Our reluctant mark making friends have been practising their skills without realizing it whilst being engaged in messy play which is what happens when you mix water, conditioner and corn flour!

We looked closely at spiders and tried to draw them using charcoal and chalks.

We did some large scale mark making on the floor with pencils, pens and chalk. We drew pictures and practised writing our names.

We drew pictures of ourselves that will be printed onto tea towels that you might like to buy for your family for Christmas presents.

Miss Vincent told us about Diwali which is also known as the festival of lights celebrated at this time of year by Hindu people. We learned about the special lights called divas and looked at the beautiful rangoli patterns. We love to hear about other people's lives and cultures.

At the end of the week we made our own charcoal on the fire which we put into elder wood pencils. We chose twigs that we wanted to turn into charcoal and we made sure that they were the

right size to fit into the tin. Some willow twigs were put in as well.

The tin was then put into the fire. While that was happening we peeled the bark off the pencil lengths of elder with peelers. We were very careful to peel away from our fingers because the blade was very sharp. When the charcoal was made we pushed little bits of it into the ends of the elder sticks and

drew with them. We learned lots of new words such as elder, willow, charcoal, lengths, snap and brittle. Later on we made popcorn, counting the

number of pops that happened. We knew that when the pops slowed down the popcorn was cooked. All of those little kernels of popping corn filled up the pan. There was so much popcorn but we managed to eat the lot!

Before lunch on Friday we worked up an appetite by walking up the mountain. Some of us collected chalk and some of us played in the dips and gullies. We were so worn out, it’s a good job that

it was all downhill on the way back!

We hope that you have a lovely half term break. We are really looking forward to our Halloween Fun Day on Tuesday 31st October for the Westmeston Tuesday children. Please feel free to dress up if you want to!