Squirrels News - 16th January 2026
Our Topic Book this week was Ruby’s Worry by Tom Percival. This is a wonderful story that highlights the importance of talking about our feelings and is also the show we will be going to watch at the Polka Theatre very soon. In the story, Ruby’s worry is shown as a yellow cloud that grows bigger and bigger until she shares how she is feeling. As a class, we discussed how feelings can sometimes be represented by different colours and which colours might represent our own feelings.
During Free Flow sessions, the children were busy completing puzzles, creating shapes using elastic bands and peg boards, and heading out on safari to see which animals they could find. As the morning continued, the Role Play airport became very busy, with some children jetting off to Africa to continue their safari adventures, while others travelled to Chocolate Land. News of this land quickly spread, and many children changed their original destinations to join in the chocolatey fun. The children also explored different emotions through painting. There was no right or wrong, and it was fascinating to observe the variety of colours each child chose to represent different feelings.
During Focus Times, we looked at photographs of children expressing various emotions and discussed how they might be feeling and why, even when the context in the pictures was limited. We then focused on the initial letter sounds of some feeling words, such as S for sad, A for angry, and T for tired. Following this, the children wrote some of the emotion words to accompany their artwork. The children shared their Weekend and Holiday News and were very excited to talk about their Christmas adventures. They then wrote and illustrated a short piece about their holidays.
During Outdoor Learning this week we have been exploring nature and developing our photography skills. Around our local environment we spotted lavender, oregano and rosemary. Some of the children particularly loved smelling the lavender. We noticed some daffodils sprouting as well as other plants growing and interesting creations which we wanted to capture so we explored photography. We talked about having things in focus, not cutting bits of our image out and making sure the whole of what we wanted to capture was within the frame. Many of the children found it a little tricky to locate the item they wanted to capture on the screen or found that they were a little shaky so it was tricky to keep the object in the frame or in focus. That didn’t matter though and we had plenty of opportunities to practice our photography skills. The children enjoyed running around and exploring the garden pretending the tree gave them special powers to freeze and unfreeze people.