The children have loved our story of Big Box, Little Box, it has been a great opportunity for the children to learn new descriptive words as well as laugh at the antics of the cat and the mouse! The junk boxes have been used to create a playground and a house using various sizes of boxes, with the children using their imagination and creative skills to think about which boxes and shapes would be good for their models and using glue and Sellotape to join the boxes together. We all constructed a fantastic castle using the big boxes - the children were amazing at stacking the boxes to make turrets and a doorway. Through the doorway, there was an imaginary world created by the children with beds for the princesses and the king! At tidy-up time, the children were super at fitting the smaller boxes into the bigger ones and tidying them up into piles!

The children loved using the different colours to create patterns on the boxes such as snazzy, jazzy and spotty, just like the ones in the story. The children spent over half an hour decorating the boxes and adding star stickers too. The boxes were then used to hide in from Storm Eowyn and then made into an aeroplane which was flying to France!

Everyone loved painting their egg boxes with red, green, brown and green paint to go on a nature hunt. The children carefully chose each colour and painted the inside of each egg shape, thinking about what they could find outside to put into each section. There were a lot of conversations about the colours of the leaves when we went for a nature walk to find natural objects for each colour in our Colour Nature Boxes.

It was lovely to see the children join in excitedly with our Listening Box game. They loved singing the song and then lifting the lid to find a favourite item inside the box and listening to the initial sound of each item from conkers to bells and cars. For the children’s Special Books this week, they drew some amazing pictures of the cat and mouse from our story. Details such as whiskers and pointy ears were added for the cat and the children showed good awareness of drawing smaller shapes to represent the mouse.

In Pre-Prep assembly, the children were absolutely fantastic at performing the story of Goldilocks and the Bears! The audience loved the acting and they were amazed at how confident the children were to act out their characters to everyone. Goldilocks and the three bears were able to recall all the phrases as I read the story and the bears in the forest were amazing at keeping the baby bears quiet with lots of cuddles! We all sang along to the song When Goldilocks went to the House of the Bears. Mrs Sayers and I were super proud of all the children.

The Special Leaf this week was for helping and showing the new Nursery children our routines by being a special friend. Another proud moment on Wednesday!

Next week, we are looking forward to our trip to Otford Library, where we know Lorraine and Marianne will read some lovely stories and have some activities for us to do. We love our walk through the village looking for the ducks on the pond and the cakes in the cake shop! We are also going to celebrate Chinese New Year with lots of exciting activities planned, as well as reading our book of the week and doing lots of fun number activities!