34. The great Arctic and Zodiac – Spring 22 Newsletter

Arctic

Arctic – During the Spring term at Privett Montessori, the children covered a variety of different subjects and greatly enjoyed learning the names of many Arctic animals at circle time. For our subject ‘The Artic’, one of the children’s favourite activities was looking at photographs of Arctic animals and sharing which one was their favourite.

Two of the animals which were popular among children were the polar bears and the walruses. In the book area we read lots of books about the Arctic, with some of them being information books and others fictional stories. We also learned a song called “The Frost is in the air” which the children loved singing.

In the craft area, the children painted some snow pictures, and then created some polar bear collages. The children also practiced their cutting skills by snipping and crafting what turned out to be very some very beautiful snowflakes. Outside, we were extremely lucky as the weather matched our theme so we left bowls of water outside overnight.

The next day, the children were very delighted to go out into the garden and find that the water they had left out had turned into ice! They then had even more fun breaking the ice into pieces. In the classroom we made our own Arctic play area with snow, ice water and Arctic animals and even found some lost cars in the ice. We also as it was so cold, fed the birds outside and gave them bird seed.

For our cooking activity, the children learned how to make fresh orange juice, which they enjoyed squeezing to extract the juice. We then drank the orange juice with our fruit at snack time.

Zodiac

In February, we learned about the Chinese New Year. The children watched a short, educational video explaining to them what the Chinese New Year is and how it is celebrated around the world. The children then enjoyed dancing with scarfs and fabric to recreate what they had seen. At snack time we cooked some noodles and used some chopsticks to eat it. In the craft area we had some tiger activities, making masks and tiger pictures.

Want to know that 2022 Chinese Zodiac sign? Press the Zodiac button

Zodiac

Then after we had finished our Chinese Topic, we started learning about opposites and at Welcome time, we played an opposite game where the children had to work out the opposite pictures that fitted together. In the craft area we made a day and night picture and an up and down picture. We read some opposite books and did lots of opposite puzzles. By the end of the week, the children were saying words and their friends were able to work out the opposite word.

Finally, we spoke about friendship. At circle time, the children were encouraged to say something kind about one of their friends, or to say something kind that had happened to them during the week. After our discussion, we learned a song called “I Have a good friend” and we also read lots of books about being kind to our friends.

In March, we celebrated the World Book Day. The children came in wearing costumes and each brought in their favourite book to share with their friends. Some of the costumes that we had was George, Cat Ninja, a puppy, a fairy and a pirate. We all greatly enjoyed reading the stories and had fun telling each other our favourite parts. We showed the children how to hold and flick book pages in a gentle manner, and we also learned how to distinguish between a library book and a nursery book.

During the second week of March, our topic was all about minibeasts, so as part of our topic we learned some names of some minibeasts such as: dragonflies, grasshoppers, spiders, millipedes, ants, fly centipedes etc. The children had lots of fun exploring in the garden and loved being bug investigators. The children used magnifying glasses to look for some bugs outside.

We also talked about their habits and about how some of them lived in different places such as under logs and stones, in leaf piles, in ponds, in trees, bushes and grass. The craft area was very busy as we made cards, flowers and some vegan chocolate hearts for Mummy. When we made our chocolate hearts, we learnt how chocolate melts when it is heated and then solidifies when it cools down.

For our final week before the holiday, we were busy with Easter crafts. Some of the crafts that we did was decorating some eggs, and making Easter baskets. We then had our traditional Easter Egg Hunt in our garden which the children all enjoyed. In the cooking section, the children had fun making chocolate crispy cakes which we then pretended was a bird’s nest. For lunch, we were very lucky as the weather was lovely, so we made the most of the early spring sunshine and had our lunch outside.

April may have been a short month at nursery with only a couple of weeks, but it was packed with learning fun. We talked about transport and the type of vehicles we have. The children learned that some vehicles travel by air, sea and land. They had a lot of fun playing the game “guess what”. We called out the vehicle and the guessed whether the vehicle is used by air, sea or land. In our craft area we did junk modelling and the children made their favourite transport using recycled materials.

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