We can’t quite believe how quickly the last 7 weeks has flown by and all of our Little Owls, old and new, have settled so well.

At the beginning of the new term, we paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth ll after her sad passing. We laid flowers and decorated the Apple tree that we planted for her Jubilee celebrations and sensitively discussed the things that children may have heard or seen on the television. We also talked about our new king, King Charles lll.

We started the term with lots of sensory play, encouraging the children to use different processes whilst they play, create, investigate and explore, moon sand and gloop are always favourites and scented play dough too. Fun activities to develop those little hand muscles have been popular, manipulating the playdough is great for this and we’ve played peg games, made necklaces and tried really hard to pick things up with tweezers, which can be really tricky!

We have explored signs of autumn this half term too and we could not write this blog without telling you all about our conker activities!!! As most of you are aware we are lucky enough to have a very large horse chestnut tree in our garden and it has given us so many leaning opportunities. The children have watched in amazement as the conkers fell from the tree, they explored the fallen conkers and found that some of them were still in their husk and were very inventive on how to get them out, this gave us lots of opportunity for new language. We collected them, we counted them, we weighed them, we felt them, we rolled them, we poured them, we drew them and yes, we even painted with them! Watch out for our book ‘101 things to do with conkers’! Alongside these activities there were lots of others, we found a bear and a hedgehog sleeping in a cave, and vegetables planted in a tuff tray farm giving us the opportunity to learn about hibernation and harvest in a hands-on way.

Although we still have an abundance of conkers, we finished the term with lots of pumpkins! The children absolutely love hammering golf tees into them, managing risk and developing their fine motor skills. Scooping out the insides and finding the seeds and the soft, squelchy flesh is always a hit and they used some of it to make their own potions. Our Little Owls got inventive with pumpkin rolling and skittle games and they also worked together to try and smash the pumpkins open, trying a variety of tools.

Our term starts back on Monday, 31st October and I’m sure the children will love to tell us about any spooky activities they have been up to. Firework night will soon follow and we always like to talk about firework safety with the children and I’m sure there will be some glittery firework pictures!

Nursery Rhyme week is 14th-18th November and we always like to link into some traditional rhymes, they are so important for early literacy development.

The end of the next half term is the Little Owls teams favourite time of year – Christmas, we are already planning magical activities! We will end our term with our fun filled Christmas party on Friday 16th December.