Week Beginning 5th February 2018 - Westmeston

It has been a pretty chilly week with frost, lots of rain, sleet and even snow! We have enjoyed some

sunshine as well. Despite the changeable weather, we have still had lots of fun playing outside and we are noticing how the plants like stinging nettles and celandines are starting to grow. We have to be careful that we don't tread on them while we are playing. On the path, up the mountain, Jemima spotted some beautiful red berries that belonged to a type of iris. We know that these are from last year and that they could make new plants.

Over the past few weeks we have been looking at birds that we might see and we have been talking about how they will be building nests. We looked at some real nests and we saw that they were made from twigs, moss and mud and that some were messy and some were neat! We will look out for real

ones when we are out and about but we know that we must not touch them in case they are still being used. We also looked at a bird song book and we enjoyed matching up the numbers on the page to the digital display which played the song of the bird we chose. We wanted to listen to them all!

Some of us used real test tubes when we did experiments with Miss Edwards. She also did lots of crazy dancing. We think she must have been trying to keep warm!

We have enjoyed playing with Miss Vincent's loose parts and

making cool 3D shapes. We have also been doing some finger gym which is exercising our hands and fingers to improve our pencil control. This week we were stretching elastic bands over pine cones.

On Wednesday, a tuneful man called Mark came and sang songs with us. We enjoyed singing Fox in a Box and the Teddy Bear Show amongst other songs.

Mrs Hilton has been helping us with our phonics and we have, of course, been practising writing our names. On Thursday we lined up all of the dinosaurs to see if they would reach across the hall. They didn't quite make it!

We had hot chocolate, marshmallows and cheesy pittas round a warm fire on our last chilly day.

We then had an energetic walk up the mountain where we played games to keep ourselves warm. We enjoyed pulling each other up the slopes with a rope and worked together as a team. We made fairies and hearts when we got back into the warm. They were fiddly and involved twisting, threading and using pipettes - more finger gym!

Finally, Conker Sheep came back from a Birthday sleepover at Hunter's house! How wonderful! We did enjoy hearing about that! Conker Sheep has now gone to Johann's house for half term.

We hope that you enjoy Valentine's Day, Pancake Day and Chinese New Year all happening in half term! See you in a week's time!