On Monday, we shared a lovely circle time, listening to everyone talk about their holidays and looking at their Home/School Journals. The children completed some brilliant work, drawing a picture of their holidays and having a go at writing a sentence to accompany it. All children are able to hold their pencil using the correct grip and are really getting the hang of copying those tricky letter shapes.

Our area of interest for this week has been all about food. The children were very excited to get to try some fruits and vegetables on Monday. We were very careful about how we tried each one, thinking about our five senses before eating them. There was lots of lovely language about what we could see, feel and smell before we finally got to put the foods in our mouths to see what we could taste and hear as we bit into them. The children did a fantastic job at trying new foods. Some children even discovered that they did like some of the foods that they thought they didn’t!

To continue thinking about our five senses, we went on a lovely walk around the grounds, discussing what we could see, feel, smell, hear and taste! We found a cold, wet metal railing, a rough, itchy wall and soft plants. There’s not so much to taste around the grounds of Russell House and so the children took their morning snack with them to enjoy at the Paddock.

We have had lots of fun with food-related activities this week. The children have been busy squeezing and mixing to make citrus fruit teas and have been exploring foods with seeds, which are great to use for counting!We used potatoes, carrots and celery to do some printing and the children were challenged to make a repeating pattern with their prints. We also made shape pizzas, selecting if we wanted to use circles, triangles, rectangles or squares as toppings!

On Thursday, we had a look at where foods come from by looking at labels on items of food from Miss Keeling’s kitchen. We were surprised to learn that lots of the foods that we eat at home and buy at the supermarkets have not come from England. The oranges were from Spain, tomatoes from Italy, sugar from Mauritius and lentils from Canada! We spoke about how this might be impacting the environment, and how it would be a good idea to try to grow our own foods. The children decided that they would like to try planting and growing some vegetables next week.

Finally, we have been enjoying the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and have been working hard to create our own Transition class version of the story! Each child had a day of the week and decided what the caterpillar would eat that day. It has been exciting to feel like real authors and read our story all together.