This week we have been Fire Safety Officers and have learned all about keeping safe on Bonfire Night. We have also been mark making  using different media, including shaving foam, glitter and paint. We have explored colours and practised our cutting, tearing and gluing skills to create lots of fantastic fireworks and beautiful bonfires.

We have been practising our number recognition and counting skills by playing number games with our loose parts and natural autumn objects.

We had a lovely woodland walk this week, with lots of fun exploring and playing with the Autumn leaves. We also loved playing Circle games in the woods.

Our Small World road and town toys have helped us to practice traffic light awareness, to help us be responsible and to stay safe. We also learned how to safely toast marshmallows around a firepit and we made Smores with them which were delicious.

Just a wee reminder that, now the weather is changing, named wellies and waterproofs are helpful so that we can continue to play outside as much as possible. If you have any queries about this please speak to a member of the ELC team.

Finally, we had a lovely afternoon tea party to say ‘Goodbye’ to Mrs Ward. We all enjoyed the delicious food and beautifully decorated tables.  It was a very special occasion and we will all miss Mrs Ward very much.

We have had lots of spooky Halloween fun this week in ELC.  There has been Covid friendly apple doukin’, a spooky photobooth, pumpkin playdough and lots of fun art and craft activities for us to practice using a paint brush, glue and scissors. We loved dressing up and going to look at all the decorated pumpkins in school. If you want to try making playdough at home, we have included our recipe in the blog photos below.

We were all very excited when our new construction bricks arrived. The boys and girls were very helpful when they helped to unpack the bricks. They have had lots of fun using their imagination and sharing ideas when they have been building with them.

One group were inspired, through their play, to make a police car. They showed great curiosity, teamwork and problem solving when they worked together to make the car from a big box. They then chose and talked about police stories, to link their learning and develop early literacy skills.

A lot of the boys and girls have enjoyed sharing stories and developing their early literacy skills in our cosy reading area this week . Our Costa Coffee role play area is also very popular and provides a great context for children to build their confidence, creativity and to develop their vocabulary.

Please feel free to comment on our blog each week, we love to see your feedback.

This week we have been enjoying the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. We even have our very own beanstalk for Jack to climb, but we haven’t found the giant yet.

We have also been developing our mathematical vocabulary by comparing objects around ELC. We are getting very good at ordering objects according to their size.

Every day we are practising recognising our names in print, to help us understand that print has meaning. We can now use our self-registration board all by ourselves and we have even started finding our name stickers in our colour group folders, which we put on our artwork.

We have practised our fine motor skills by cutting and sticking tissue paper, to make these beautiful autumn leaves.

We have also being thinking about what makes us feel respected. We talked about how we like to be listened to and taken seriously. We also thought about how important it is to share with each other and take turns to show that we respect each other.

Staff in our ELC are skilled at encouraging all our children to lead their learning. An important part of this is encouraging  children to talk about their learning through questions.

We are continuing to try new foods and enjoy healthy snacks in ELC. These watermelon lollies were delicious!

Finally, we would like to say a huge ‘Thank you’ for all your positive feedback during the parental phone calls this week. It is lovely to hear that our children are sharing at home just how much they are enjoying all the learning opportunities in ELC.