The children have thoroughly enjoyed sharing what they have been up to and they did a great job at drawing pictures for their half-term news. Some of us even practised doing our very own writing to accompany our pictures.

Our theme for this week is pirates! This has been chosen as a topic as the children have very much shown an interest in all things to do with pirates. We started off the week by taking part in lots of pirate-themed activities; pirate ships, Pop Up Pirate and a pirate themed memory game. Miss Mitchem set the challenge of creating a pirate ship using the loose parts in our outside area. We used the tyre as a steering wheel and piled the crates to create the sides of the boat.

After reading Pirates Love Underpants, we wanted to create our own treasure maps. We identified that quite often, pirate maps look old and worn. We used tea bags to paint our paper to give it a special effect. After the paper dried, we used a selection of beads to help us make an outline for the treasure island. We had to use super fine motor skills as we traced around the beads. Once we had our outline, it was time to fill it in. We did this in a range of ways.

On Tuesday, the weather was lovely. We ventured to the paddock for a picnic to eat our snack. Once we had eaten we played a game of Pirate Pete says which has the same rules as Simon Says just with a different piratey theme. I was very impressed with the focus maintained throughout the whole game. It was very tricky to get the children out.

On Wednesday, Transition led the Pre-Prep assembly. Our assembly was all about our trip to Lullingstone. We shared pictures from our trip and all the children shared their experiences and what they enjoyed the most. We also showed what we had made whilst at Lullingstone, including; stick people and a bow/arrow! At the end of the assembly, we sang a lovely song that we have been learning which is all about the life cycle of a caterpillar. During the half term, our class caterpillars emerged from their cocoons and flew away as butterflies.

Our letter sound this week is b. Banana, boat, beast, bus and blackberries. One of the words we came up with was banana. We found some numbered banana cards and played a number game with them. We had to recognise the amount on Miss Mitchem’s card before showing the correct numeral.

Towards the end of the week we had more chances to get creative. Whilst playing outside, we recreated walking the plank. We did this by balancing a wooden plank on some crates. We had to make sure we had super balance otherwise we would fall into the shark infested waters! Following the success of our pirate treasure maps, we wanted to map a shark craft too. We had to create our shark shape using grey paint, we then added lots of sharp teeth and eyes.