Squirrels News - 23rd January 2026
This week we have been learning about William Morris as we entered the first of 3 weeks of learning about various artists. We discussed how one of the reasons William Morris began creating home furnishings was because he couldn’t find anything he liked to decorate his own home with. The children then went on to develop their scissor skills by cutting out various items from magazines that they might like to have in their own homes.
In honour of our Artists Topic, our Role Play Area was transformed into an art studio, where the Squirrels’ artists have been busy creating their own masterpieces. The paint was flowing as the children created butterflies, people, cats and lots more. The children were keen to mix different colours and experiment with a range of brush sizes as they created their masterpieces. William Morris’s wallpaper designs have inspired some of the children’s own pattern work, and patterns have featured this week during Focus Time as we explored repeated patterns in Morris’s work.
During Free Flow this week the children have enjoyed fishing for letter crabs, identifying the letter sounds of the crabs they caught, tracing numbers, practising writing them, and threading beads to create beautiful jewellery as well as many other fun activities.
This week we went to Dew Drop In, where the 'Big Kids' and 'Little Kids' threaded a range of pasta shapes onto a string to make necklaces using out-of-date pasta that we repurposed.
The children are becoming much more confident in conversing and engaging with the pensioners, and it is wonderful to see the smiles on everyone's faces as they interact with one another.
On our Outdoor Learning Day we explored and collected natural objects to create pieces of art, inspired by the artist Jon Foreman, our second artist of the week. While Jon Foreman usually creates his artwork on the spot using materials found in nature at that moment, we walked around the common collecting items for our own creations. These materials will be left to dry so that we can experiment with shapes before returning them to the common to create our natural artwork.
We also discussed other environments, such as the beach, which is another backdrop Jon Foreman uses for his art creations. When it was time to leave the common, a couple of children asked if they could stay longer and continue collecting materials, showing high levels of engagement and interest. What a wonderful week we have had in Squirrels classroom.