Week commencing 11th January - Westmeston

This week our focus was on 'Making Relationships' and we spent time talking about our families and our feelings. We read the book 'We Are Family' which was a lovely way to start our discussions. We looked at families of every sort and the children noticed families that looked like theirs and families that looked different to theirs.

Throughout the week, we also read 'The Colour Monster' which helped the children to identify emotions and assign a colour to them. They had fun decorating a Colour Monster picture and deciding how he felt.

We have been looking closely at our surroundings this week. On Tuesday we noticed some signs of animals in the garden - the children spotted a new hole in the ground and then we found some rabbit poo on one of our fire circle log, It is lovely to know that animals enjoy our surroundings as much as we do.

We also explored a pile of logs that was made from a tree in the garden that had to be cut down due to having an infection. The children were not allowed to climb on or touch the wood but it was interesting to see the patterns in the middle of the trunk. .

Keeping on the theme of trees, we discussed the different varieties in the Westmeston garden. The children learnt the words 'deciduous' and 'evergreen' and we searched around us for examples of both types. We are excited to watch the trees change as we get closer to spring.

It was such a rainy day on Thursday but this just meant lots of muddy fun for us!

The rainy day was brightened up by a birthday celebration. We enjoyed cake, party games and lots of energetic dancing!

On Friday we had a very international day. Mrs Spencer had put together a map showing different games from around the world. This led to the children making flags of their own. They had some lovely ideas about what their flags represented :

"This is the flag of space,"

"It's the flag of Hassocks."

"This is a flag of everyone."

The children then had great fun playing the different games from around the world. These games included Ounch Neech from Pakistan, which involved the children finding high and low spots to hide. We played Bocce from Italy which was a game just like bowls, with the aim being for the children to roll their ball as close as possible to the target ball.

Pilolo was a game from Ghana in which the children had to run around to find a hidden object....

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.. and finally Un, deux, trois,, soleil from France was a very fun running game similar to What’s The Time Mr Wolf. These active games were a great chance for the children to learn about the importance of activity and the effect it has on our bodies.

Activity is one thing we are never short of at Westmeston! Our Friday walk was full of climbing and exploring this week as we stopped to play at our forest school site in the woods. The children discovered that the den we have built there is not only fun for hiding in, but also fun for climbing on!

A fallen tree trunk made an excellent balancing beam and also a train which the children enjoyed riding on.

It wasn’t all action though; we spent some time quietly sitting in our log circle listening for bird call. We were particularly listening for the song of a great tit and although we didn’t hear one, we did hear some other beautiful birds singing.

We love the way the children explore and always find new and interesting games to play on our walks. What a wonderful playground our natural environment is!