Our story of Handa’s Surprise has introduced the children to some new vocabulary and they have been so quick to learn all about the different fruits and animals in the story. They created their own shopping lists of the fruit from the story by carefully cutting around each fruit and adding it to their list. The children were amazing at recalling which animal took which fruit and what part of their body they used to pick it up with, such as the elephant's trunk and the parrot's beak. We were all amazed at how Handa was able to carry all that fruit in a basket on her head! We also chatted about the continent of Africa and how it is hot and sunny and we noticed how different the houses were to ours in the story. More super scissor work was used to cut around the pictures of the animals from Handa’s Surprise and stuck onto animal print to make a fabulous African animal collage.

The children were really excited to explore all the different fruits in the basket and they were amazing at remembering all the names of the fruit as we read Handa’s Surprise. We looked at the different skin on the fruit and all the children tried to guess what colour would be inside the fruit too. All of them were so good at tasting the fruit even if they decided they didn’t like it! At the end the children decided that their favourite fruits were the banana, avocado, mango and the kiwi (which was instead of the guava which I was unable to find on my shopping trip!) In fact myself and Mrs Sayers were so impressed with how brilliant they were at trying the fruit that ALL the children got the special leaf in assembly this week!

As everyone had been so good at tasting the fruit, we decided to learn how to prepare food by peeling carrots with real peelers. The children listened very carefully to the safety instructions of how to hold the peeler safely and wear a glove on their hand. There was some amazing peeling going on and turning the carrots around to make sure all the skin was removed. We think you will have some brilliant little helpers for making dinner this week!

It was lovely to hear about some of the children’s experiences of fireworks - who liked the noisy ones and who liked watching from the window at home. They designed their own firework pictures by using cardboard tubes (frilled at the ends) to splatter different colours of paint onto black paper and the results are fantastic!  We also watched some very loud and beautiful fireworks on the interactive board.

Mrs Sayers and I had heard about something new that had arrived for the children up on the paddock, so on Tuesday we were very excited to go up after our snack to see what we could find. On our way up there, we were trying to guess what we might find. Some suggestions were a chocolate coin or a dinosaur park! The children (and us) were absolutely blown away by the new pirate ship play equipment up on the paddock. Wow! Such a fabulous piece of play equipment for lots of imaginative play and physical activity. We know it’s going to be well-used by the Nursery children!

We are looking forward to our trip to the library on Tuesday and it is our turn to do the Pre-Prep assembly on Wednesday, when we will be showing some of the fabulous work the children have been doing so far this term.