Next week we will be exploring the Book “A Squash and a Squeeze” which is written by one of our favourite authors Julia Donaldson. A little known fact is that this story is actually based on an old Polish/Jewish folktale! If you do not have the book at home there are lots of renditions of the story on YouTube that you could watch together with your child at home.

As with all of the books we are going to focus on this half term this book gives lots of opportunities for children to listen out for rhyming words on every page. At Pals we spend a lot of time encouraging the children to hear, find and make up their own rhyming words as it is such an important tool in learning to decipher the written code, If you can hear the patterns in words it helps you later on to find those matching patterns on a page.

We will basing some of our activities around this book next week including:

1.       Making houses out of different size boxes to see how many of our small world animals will fit in each one.

2.     Make houses using a variety of construction bricks

3.     Using some of our small world houses and animals to re-tell the story ourselves.

4.     Making up our own words to rhyme with some of the couplets in the book

5.     Painting or drawing pictures to create our own illustrations of the story

6.     Talking about shape, space and measure as we look at the shape and size of the house

7.     Talk about quantity as we count the number of animals (or living creatures) in the house including the old lady and the wise old man.

8.     Explore mathematical language such as full and empty as we put animals in and out of our various house creations.

9.     Talk about weight as we lift up our houses with or without animals in

10.  Talk about the different animals and point out their unique features

11.   Explore language that may be new to the children such as “larder”, “implore”, “tap out a jig” and “weeny”.

This week the children have each painted and decorated a beautiful tealight  and they have all taken great care over their painting and choice of gems to decorate them with.  Together with the other seasonal crafts they are bringing home over the next few days we do hope that they bring you all a little festive cheer!

Also this week we decorated the back of the hall with our nativity back drops and the children all had the opportunity to dress up in a nativity costume. Those children who were in on Wednesday then performed our nativity songs whilst Teresa narrated the story the biggest star "Shine, Star, Shine". Despite the fact that sadly we were unable to have an audience this year, the children loved it and it was a very special moment in what has been a challenging year!  A very special photograph of your child in costume will adorn the christmas cards that the children have made this year.

Despite this being a very different year, the children have enjoyed some festive fun this week. We have sung the nativity songs once again and the children have shown such joy whilst doing so.  we also had two party sessions at the end of the week with some festive food, christmas music and party games.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Christmas and a healthy New Year.

This week the hall has taken on a very festive look with all the children's lovely art work displayed.  We have some beautiful stained glass window effect Diva lamps on the windows which look lovely with the light shining through. The children have also been busy making Christmas stockings and wreaths which look lovely strung up along the wall at the end of the hall.  

On Tuesday afternoon the children helped to decorate our Christmas trees and with their lights on I have to say "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas".

Meanwhile, we have continued to learn our nativity songs and while we are not doing a Nativity play as such this year, we are going to put our backdrops up in the hall, dress the children in nativity costumes and let them sing their hearts out whilst we narrate our tale called "Shine Star Shine".