We started our week off with Remembrance Day, considering why we wear poppies and why it is important to take two minutes of silence to think about those who fought in the war and those continuing to fight in the world today. All the Pre-Prep children showed fantastic respect and sat absolutely silently for two minutes. It was a lovely chance for reflection during a busy school term. In Transition, we enjoyed collaborating with each other to create two large poppy collages and some children had a go at using buds to print careful poppy pictures.

We have had lots of fun getting stuck into our space theme this week. There was much fascination learning the names of the nine planets in our solar system. Through a solar system model, a book and a useful video on the C-touch, Transition learnt some interesting planet facts such as; that Jupiter is the largest planet, Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and Pluto is the smallest planet. We also learnt lots of new words such as orbit. We have been working very hard on creating our very own solar system model in Transition. Since there are nine children in Transition, each child had a planet and looked carefully at what colours were needed to create their planet. Using marbles and paint, the children tipped a tray to decorate their planet. We then lined up with the planets according to the distance from the sun and orbited Miss Keeling, who was the sun.

The children enjoyed exploring a new role-play Space Station area. There have been many journeys to space, alien sightings and astronauts in Transition this week. It has also been lots of fun exploring our moon dust messy play outside and creating alien faces complete with lots of googly eyes.

We had a very tricky job to do this week in our maths focus. The children had to order the numbers from 10 backwards down to 0. To check that we had done it correctly, we pretended to get into our space suits and onto the rocketship and countdown from 10 along the number line to blast off. Luckily, the Transition children are very good at counting and all the numbers were in the right order to safely blast off into space.

We were very excited to receive a visit from two Kent Police officers this week at school. All the Pre-Prep children loved meeting PC Claire and PCSO Tim and listened very carefully to find out what police officers do and how they keep us safe. We even got to go outside to look at a real police car and try on real police uniforms. I think we will definitely have some future police officers in Pre-Prep.

Finally, as a part of Transition’s increasing independence, Mrs Nelson and I have begun to introduce the children to a washing up bowl after snacktime. Any children who have had milk, wash up their own cup at the end of snacktime. The class have really enjoyed taking responsibility for themselves.

You might even have some more help washing up at home now, if you’re lucky!