Surprise Surprise!

This week we have focussed on the story Handa's Surprise; the story is about Handa, a girl from Africa who puts seven delicious fruits into a basket to take to her friend Akeyo. On her journey Handa's delicious fruits are taken one by one by an animal, she does not notice the animals taking her fruits from the basket on top of her head.

We went on a story hunt with Mark from the Freshwater Theatre Company; we climbed mountains, swam seas and sunk into sand on our hunt for Handa's fruit.

 We met Mark's friend Big Bird, he set up the story hunt for us but he kept falling asleep!

Mark was very funny- he thought anything orange was a carrot and anything red was a strawberry!

We have set up a Handa's Surprise small world area for the children to act out the story using props.

 We have also started to transform our reading room into the African plains, these are the animals from the story with the different fruits, the children have enjoyed helping to paint and decorate the characters.

 

The children participated in taking a survey to find out which fruit is the most popular. We went around the school asking people which fruit they preferred, they could choose banana, pineapple or orange; banana was chosen the most. Here we are conducting our surveys.

We also did the survey in class, we choose from banana, strawberry or apple- strawberries are our favourite fruit! We used our interactive whiteboard to document our findings. 

For our cooking activity this week we made an exotic fruit salad; we cut up the fruit carefully, mixed it in a big bowl and added some orange juice- scrummy! We tried lots of the fruits that Handa took (or tried to take!) to Akeyo- mango, banana, guava, passion fruit and pineapple. 

 We also had 'Show & Tell' this week, the children loved bringing in a special item from home to share with the class.

Here are some more pictures of our busy week...

 We decided to make numbers for our bikes and scooters, then drew parking places onto the floor with chalk.

The children had to match their bike number with the parking place. 

A popular activity was the cars and ramps.

We had lots of fun playing with jelly stones and scoops, they're so bright and colourful!

Look how the colours changed when the stones were mixed together!

The children had lots of fun working together to build a train of linking camels.

 First of all the camels went around the construction area...

 then more were added so the chain stretched from the reading room all the way to other side of nursery! 

Next week- come and play with the fairies and wizards in our new fairy land.

 

We will be having a pizza and bread theme next week, expect pizza maths, cooking pitta pizzas, tasting breads from around the world and a pizza restaurant role play area! 

Healthy eating

This week's theme has been Healthy Eating; the children have participated in lots of activities to help them understand why eating healthily is important. The children enjoyed drawing pictures of their favourite foods onto paper plates.

We have added the plates to our new role play area 'Our Lady's Café'

 The children have been learning about the different roles in a restaurant and acting them out, we have a dishwasher.

 A cashier. 

 Waitresses and waiters. 

 A chef. 

 And customers. 

 The children have been able to take orders from the customers and 'write' them down, they have also been using play money in the till and telling customers how much their meal costs. 

Other fun activities included:

Writing and drawing using wipe-able markers.  

Constructing with wooden blocks.

 Mark-making in salt and glitter. 

 Comparing groups of objects. 

 Counting and sorting coloured keys.

 Making shapes and patterns using coloured tiles. 

 Finding and matching shapes in the environment.

Junk modelling. 

 Writing letters with large brushes in lentils. 

 Painting with potato mashers.

They make really interesting patterns and lines. 

 In our weekly cooking session we made fruit smoothies. The children learnt how to cut up the fruit safely; we made strawberry & banana and orange and mango drinks- they were yummy!

Next week we will be using the book Handa's Surprise to base our activities on; the children will participate in a workshop based on the story with a theatre company and we will make a fruit salad using some of the exotic fruits in the book.