The squirrels have explored lots of interesting activities this week. They've used their chromebook skills to research a range of countries in Asia and try to find and record a specific animal or feature key to that country.

As part of their learning the children are doing some free sewing. They are learning to go up and down, thread their needles and make their own line patterns. They are choosing whether they are going to sew with wool, thread or ribbon.

This week the children have been learning about the a Jewish festival of light, Hanukkah. They have listened to the story of Hanukkah and the miracle of the oil lamp that took place in a temple. Part of the Jewish tradition is to have food cooked in oil so at forest school we made pancakes on the fire. Mrs Harris told us about Hanukkah and even spoke some Hebrew for us. 

This week the children are practising their take away skills. We will start by using lots of resources to take away and then we will move on to drawing what we do. 

This week the children are learning about adding small numbers and different ways to make number sentences. Again don't be tempted to use big numbers. We used a 0-9 dice and the partition tree (circles diagram) The children are learning about the equals sign being in different places in the number sentences as well so I sometimes refer to it as the "is the same as" sign.   "3 is the same as 2+1" or 3=2+1 and 2+1=3

This is how the children have been learning about numbers this week. We use tens frames to help the children to understand how tens and ones link. They also help the children to see the relationship between a number and a multiple of 10. Initially the children need to be really secure in being accurate in showing numbers to 10 on the frame. If you put on some counters can they quickly say how many there are? Can they say how many without counting? (they know what four objects looks like) Don't be tempted to push them on too far. Secure knowledge of numbers to 10 is an essential skill.