Week Beginning 28th August 2017

During music and movement, the Gibbons practised their animal actions by copying the adults in what animals they imitate. From roaring like a fierce lion to flapping their big wings like a beautiful bird, the Gibbons rehearsed their best animal actions. Not the only the adults help design the boards for their room, the Gibbons got involved this week too with string painting. Using the dip dyed strings to create patterns and lines using assorted coloured paints. Please make sure you check out the string art boards. From posing like animals to building them, the Gibbons enjoyed a selection of various animal jigsaw puzzles, fitting the correct pieces together to form the animals they had been acting out. The Nature kids brought back some green beans from the allotment for the Gibbons to experiment with and our  Gibbons pulled the green peas apart to find inside small round green peas. They played with them, feeling the textures in their hands, popping open, mixing around in bowls and smelling the freshly grown vegetables.

Baboons get scientific…

It was a week of experiments in the Baboon room, when the Baboons held many cool activities to see the change in different research investigations. The first as to see the difference between tea bags and coffee beans in a sensory activity. Pouring water into cups to see the colour change in the water from the tea bags and coffee beans, the Baboons noticed the differences between the colour depending on the amount of water and ingredients used in each cup. Next ingredient was Milk! The baboons poured food colourings into glasses of milk and watched as they timed the difference in watching the milk change colour. The milk even went into a swirling pattern and the Baboons took pictures of their experiment to talk about in group time. Thank you to our families who have sent in pictures of their family, the Baboons have been helping decorate the new family wall. In one activity, the family pictures were cut up and placed in the sand box for the children to spot and find and guessed who mummy and daddy were found in the hunt through the sand. Finally, choosing their favourite colour, the Baboons painted their cars to their perfection and painted patterns onto the wheels so they print onto pictures to hang around the room for decoration. Vroom Vroom!

Inspector Gorilla…

The Gorillas got their magnifying glasses out and went on a wood louse hunt around our Nature Kids plot and the garden to investigate the habitats they lurk in. Even though they were very successful at finding the mini beast, they also watched small video clips about how wood lice shed their hard shell and how they can carry up to 24 eggs under their tiny bodies! They also arranged a display of different butterflies into colour and size after they became of high interest when chasing them at our plot. Our fantasy fanatic Gorillas crafted and drew their own marvellous superheroes with similarities of themselves to decorate our  “What’s Special About Me?” Gorilla board. They changed some of their body parts into special powers, some said “My blue eyes will be lasers to catch wolves” and others put flowers in their hair for insects to eat! Our phonic focus were W + Y which was performed as a word chanting percussion as they clapped to the syllables for every word they knew beginning in W + Y, wood louse was one of course! The nature kids got out their hand forks and shovels and dug, dug, and dug until they found our ready and round potatoes to bring back to the nursery. They collected them in a big tray and then helped cut some in half to do some potato printing in our outdoor learning area whilst they waited for the delivery of their lunch! How marvellous!