We made the most of the lovely sunshine on Monday and headed out on an autumn walk. We read a lovely story called The Leaf Thief in the Outdoor Classroom, where a silly squirrel keeps losing leaves from his tree and goes on the hunt for the leaf thief. We realised pretty quickly that there was no leaf thief but just the wind blowing the leaves off the trees in autumn time. We listened to the wind around us and even saw some leaves falling to the ground. The children did a fantastic job of collecting lots of different sized, shaped and coloured leaves from the Paddock for us to use throughout the week.

We have made the most of our leaf collection, ordering leaves from smallest to biggest and creating autumn leaf wreaths which we hope you enjoy at home! Some children have enjoyed printing with tinfoil to create orange, red and yellow autumn leaves on the trees.

I was blown away by how fantastic the Transition children sat during our Harvest Festival rehearsal on Monday morning. It was lovely to hear the Head Boy and Head Girl speak about what gratitude and harvest means to them. We hope that you enjoyed watching our Harvest Festival performance on Wednesday! We have been thinking about being thankful for the food that we eat by making sure that we don’t waste our snack during snack time and talking about how, where and by who our fruits and vegetables have been grown. The children have enjoyed exploring the small world farm set this week and have loved role playing a visit to the Farm Shop to buy real fruits and vegetables!

Once some of the fruits and vegetables looked a little well-used, we decided to turn them into a delicious and warming vegetable soup! All the children helped to chop carrots, parsnips and squash (grown by Mrs Nelson) to go into the soup maker (very gratefully borrowed from Mrs Warner). We had to stand far away from the soup maker as it got very hot, but we enjoyed listening to the whirring and watching the steam rise. Some children knew that this meant it was getting hot and nearly ready to eat. We used the mushy bananas to make banana milkshakes. These were a big hit with Transition!

Our letter sound this week was h. We enjoyed thinking of lots of words beginning with h including hedgehog, hippo, Henry, happy and hat. I can’t believe how well all the children are now able to use their super fingers to hold their pencil correctly and manipulate it to draw some fantastic pictures and form their letters. Well done, Transition.