I think I can safely say that the trip on the minibus to Otford Library was the most exciting adventure for us! Due to the inclement weather, we decided to ask if Mr Phil would be able to take us to the library in the minibus. Mr Phil was delighted he could help, so after a quick amendment to the Risk Assessment... we were off! The welcome from Lorraine and Marianne at the Library was as enthusiastic as ever and we were excited to see our other friends from Nursery there too, with their mummy and daddy. Myself, Mrs Sayers and Mrs Parmenter are always so proud of how the children behave at the library by listening to stories and joining in all the activities which are on offer to us. It is always such a lovely time together.

Marianne had created a Chinese New Year hunt where we had to look very carefully for pictures with Chinese lanterns and numbers 1 to 10! It was quite tricky as some of the numbers were hard to find, but the children managed to find them all and mark them on their checklist. We then enjoyed a Chinese New Year story and some number stories, one of which involved counting lots of animal legs! Afterwards, the children were invited to colour in some Chinese dragon pictures and woodland animals for the Otford display. If you are passing by, please pop in and see the beautiful pictures! The children then chose books to bring back to Nursery, which was so lovely to see them looking for their favourite books. We had a huge bag to take back to Nursery! Mr Phil was waiting in the car park for us so we all had an exciting time travelling back to school. We saw the Transition and Form 1 children out for their play time on the front court, and they were so happy to see us - we felt like celebrities!

We have all enjoyed celebrating Chinese New Year by doing lots of hands-on activities, including using chopsticks for the gold and red sparkly pom poms and scooping red rice into different sizes of pots. The children loved painting and decorating a Chinese Dragon, making their own Chinese dragons and tasting oodles of noodles, which was very tricky using chopsticks! The children are learning a song and a dance for our Pre-Prep Coffee Morning, all about the Chinese dragon. They are practising hard to learn the words and the moves and the actions! There was lots of snipping and cutting of the spaghetti noodles which had snakes hidden inside for us to find as it is the year of the snake. Another favourite activity was choosing some gold chocolate coins to put into their red lucky envelopes, which we are sure they have been enjoying at home.

The children have loved our story of None the Number this week looking at numbers from none or zero all the way to number 10! The story is funny with lots of opportunities for counting objects such as oranges balanced on various objects and how many times Kevin has tantrums each day! All the objects are then displayed together and then all taken away, leaving none once more. All the children have worked really hard to recognise some of the numerals from 1 to 5 and counting out the corresponding amount of spots to add to each numeral to make their own number lines. Another counting activity was counting the spots inside each of the circles and finding the correct number of pieces of fruit. There was a lot of counting, choosing of the fruits and, of course, the favourite part was tasting all the fruit! We even had Chinese numbers in our rice activity this week.

We have been enjoying playing outside in the winter sunshine, riding the bikes, cutting the grass and playing lots of imaginative games together. We saw so many snowdrops growing on Mr MCarthy’s path which looked so pretty and our bulbs are growing in our trough too! We walked up to the pirate ship where we saw Form 2 and 3 enjoying playing netball and football and Mrs Curling found a wriggly worm on the netball court so we helped her find a dark muddy place for the worm to live. 

Next week we are going to have lots of fun exploring colours for our story of Elmer the elephant who has a lot of beautiful patchwork colours.