Autumn has offically landed in Turtle class and we have started to explore the changes in the season. In our outside water area, the children have been looking at conkers and leaves and comparing sizes big, meduim and small and have thoroughly enjoyed rolling the conkers down the guttering. We have learnt an Autumn song about Autumn leaves (to the tune of London Bridge is falliung down) I wonder if the children can remember any of the lyrics. We used scrafs to represnt the leaves falling. In our malleable area we had red playdough with a variety of leaf cutters. The children could press, mould, squeeze and cut. We will continue to explore autumn more next week.

We are still taking donations of any leaves and twigs you may find on your travels and would be very much appreciated. Use the Autumn checklist added below to see what you can find.

Our book of the week this week was It's okay to be different by Todd Parr, which opened up lots of conversations and thinking within our circle times. In our small world/sensory area there was a set up from one of the pages in the book- it's okay to help a squirrel collect nuts. This also tied into the autumn theme beautifully. The children used tweezers to collect the acorns and placed them in the baskets, improving their fine motor skills.

Because the book is so colourful, this has given lots of opportunities for colour recognition. We used spoons and small nets in our water area to scoop coloured balls and pom poms into the matching buckets. In our creative area we used Q-tips to paint on foil and make marks and outside we used spray bottles with watered down paint to colour mix into a tuff tray.

We have continued with the rhyme Wind the Bobbin up. This week we have made it silly by using imaginative language, had children be the leader and others to listen and follow carefully, we have sequenced the order of the rhyme using pictures and we have played a game of wind and freeze! We finally sung it from memory as a whole with no help from the adults. Well done Turtle Class!

On Thursday we celebrated World Vegetarian Day. Turtle class got to see a variety of vegetables, including peppers, broccoli, potatoes and corn. There were lots of descriptive words used such as cold, rough, soft, bumpy. They then got the chance to do some printing with these vegetables and finally we watched the story of the vegetable patch party.

We wish you all a very lovely weekend and look forward to another week of fun and learning next week.