January in the Classroom!

January has been an exciting month in the classroom as the children were all very happy to be back with their friends after the holidays. They couldn’t wait to tell their friends what they got for Christmas, and we jumped straight back into the messy play! Our focus this month was on ‘Winter’ with a lot of discussion about the seasonal changes. We read a lot of stories about winter and snow, and we explored the idea of ‘hibernation’ and enjoyed playing with the animals who love the cold – penguins! There were a lot of penguin related activities, like freeing the penguins from blocks of ice, and mixing materials as we explored activities like snow dough, gloop, and painting our own rainbow snowflakes.

The most exciting thing of all happened – it snowed! We have been learning to be more independent and to dress ourselves in our winter gear so we pulled on our hats, scarves and gloves and braved the freezing cold snow to enjoy playing in the garden. We made our own snowman using the natural resources in the garden, and we had lots of fun exploring and looking for stones and twigs and bits of wood to use to decorate our snowman. Working as a team was so fun and we were so proud of our snowman. When he melted away we went on to make our own play dough snowmen to remember him.

We enjoyed having our mummies and daddies come to our winter themed stay and play, and it was so much fun showing them all of our toys and our friends. We also put on our Christmas play and everybody did a great job! Our family members were very impressed.

We can’t wait for February, where we’ll be exploring feelings as a focus, and as the weather gets better we will be exploring our natural areas more and looking for mini beasts!