The children are all amped up this week with Santa’s big sleigh ride looming (he’s visited some of the children already. Must be on account of population growth). The Gibbons have been jamming out to Christmas songs, which we’re sure you enjoyed at our mulled wine evening on Monday. For their creative activity, they rolled cars and balls into paint and had a track race, of sorts. Paper crafting this week was Christmas pudding and the little ones constructed their paper leaves, berries, and icing into glittery treats. Speaking of glittery, the Gibbons have been looking for all that glitters and maybe some gold for their shiny objects table. They found cd’s, bracelets, beads, cellotape, and foil for their little magpie fingers. In the small world area, the farm animals have been grazing well in their sensory areas full of rice krispies and sand. The Gibbons have been making farm animal noises and getting a real kick out of snap, crackle, popping all the rice krispies. Oink, moo.
A magic sack appeared in the home area this week and it was full of wrapping paper so the Baboons have been figuring out how to unroll the cellotape so they could get their Christmas wrapping in order. They’ve wrapped pots, pans, babies, each other. It’s been a right little Santa’s workshop in the home area. In the home area, they’ve also been cooking mince pies and reindeer food. Yum. The Baboons have absolutely been loving the loose wood log rounds and having been doing a fair bit of construction around the room using them. At the maths table, they have been balancing an assortment of sticks and rocks on top of the logs while in the conservatory, they’ve been counting how high they can stack the blocks before they all fall down. At one point, it did reach over Alex’s head so it was pretty high. As a Christmas treat, the Baboons watched a Christmas cartoon (a vintage Silly Symphonies) about a group of children whose toys all broke and someone comes along and creates new toys out of every day things like a rocking horse out of an old boot and a hoover. The Baboons were a bit concerned that all the children were so upset their toys had broken, but were very excited to see how the man made new ones for them. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
“What do you do for Christmas?” has been the question of the week for Gorillas, who’ve been very keen to share what they do at this time of year. Some of the children received presents the earlier in the month as part of their Christmas tradition, some of the children spoke about what they like to eat at Christmas, and what families they are going to see. Of course, they also shared their favourite Christmas songs and stories. In the water area, the Gorillas have been making potions using pipettes and coloured water, talking about colour mixing and what their potions will do. The children have been learning about upper and lowercase letters as they tried to copied down three and four-letter words using the keyboard as well as pencils. At the Reggio Emilia table, the Gorillas have been chalking on black paper, creating faces, line variants, and trying to form the letters of their names. On Thursday, the group went to Nature Kids and spent their time looking for birds and describing the ones they found. They also made traps out of sticks. Don’t worry, they were people traps, not animal traps. Although not sure that’s better. We can assure you it was child-led so for whatever reason, the Gorillas wanted to trap people. I blame the comics.
We hope you’ve had a wonderful year with us at Young Friends. From all of us here, have a wonderful holiday and a happy New Year. See you all on the 3rd Jan! x
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