Squirrels News - 2nd May 2025

This week we have been exploring the book 'Martha Maps it Out' by Leigh Hodgkinson. This book looks at maps of the world, cities, streets, houses and rooms in a house. In the book Martha maps out her bedroom and we decided to do the same! All of the children provided photos of their bedroom which they then created into aerial view maps. Whilst doing this we discussed positional language such as next to, left, right and under. Continuing with our map theme the Squirrels went on a local walk and mapped out our route. We included the positional language, forward, backwards, left, right and next to. It was lots of fun deciding on which details to add to our map such as cars, trees and even a cat!

Later in the week the children went on a treasure hunt, looking for letters which had been hidden around the classroom. Once a child had found a letter, they had match it to its phonics card and then say or repeat the letters name. Everyone had so much fun they wanted to keep playing even when all the letters had been found.

We also explored floating and sinking this week, making predictions about which objects we thought would float and which would sink before testing our theory. What we found interesting was in some instances it didn’t matter whether the object was heavy or light in relation to if it floated or sank.

We had glorious weather on our Outdoor Learning Day and as we set off we thought about the direction we were going, using directional language previously used in the week. Once we arrived at the common the children became knights and princes, chasing dragons. Lots of the children also enjoyed building fairy houses and miniature food for the fairies such as marshmallows which the Fairies could cook on the fire the children built for them. There was plenty of climbing, running and lots of water drunk for hydration and we spoke about what this term means.

For our Outdoor Learning Day Focus session we drew a map of our route to the common which involves a few right turns and lots of forward! The children tried extremely hard to think about what we see on our way to the common such as the underground station, shops, houses and the church, adding these to their maps. After the children had completed their maps, they drew some buttercups before heading back to nursery.