Week commencing 28th September - Westmeston

This week our focus has been on moving and handling. This is always an easy area for us to cover at Westmeston as the children are always on the move! Running in the garden, jumping over logs, balancing on ropes, climbing trees, using ride on toys - the children develop every aspect of their gross motor skills as part of their everyday play.

Because of the rain this week, we chose to do some of our physical activity in the hall. We are lucky enough to have a large indoor space where we set up block stepping stones and a spider's web for the children to climb through.

We have also focused on fine motor skills using peg board to make patterns and pens and pencils for drawing. We love to see the children mark-making in any form and the explanations of their drawings always make us smile.

During our Forest School session we learnt about hedgehogs. Paulina read the children an information book all about the prickly creatures. I wonder if your child can remember what baby hedgehogs are called? She then showed us how to make a model hedgehog using muddy clay moulded over a pine cone. We used sticks, leaves and berries for the final details.

As well as learning about hedgehogs, the children also got very involved in den building. As a team, they collected sticks to add to the shelter and used dried flowers and leaves to decorate it.

The hedgehog fun continued back at the hall with some of the children using dried leaves, grass and glue to decorate hedgehog pictures. What a lovely way to spend a sunny afternoon.

It feels as if autumn has well and truly arrived and this week we have made the most of the leaves that have fallen to the ground. We have been on leaf hunts, looking for leaves of all different shapes, colours and sizes and collecting them to make 'leaf kebabs'. It was interesting to find leaf skeletons and we looked closely at exposed veins of the leaves.

On Friday, we decided to continue the hedgehog theme and make some clay models and more dried leaf hedgehog pictures. We used pine needles in the clay to make hedgehogs spikes and left them to dry. Some of the children chose to make other clay models, including spiders and pizzas. But moulding and shaping the clay was a wonderful fine motor skills activity, no matter what the final model was!

We have collected many conkers over the past week and we put them to great use with a bit a conker rolling. The children worked as a team to find the best spots to put the pipes and then watched which conkers rolled the furthest.

Our Friday walk was very wet this week. The children were well wrapped up in waterproof clothing and had a fantastic time splashing in huge puddles and catching raindrops on their tongues.

Please send your child in with plenty of spare clothes, including socks, as even the best wet weather clothing struggles to keep these little puddle jumpers completely dry!

We look forward to more wet weather fun next week.