New friendships – Yoga and mindfulness

This week in barn owls we have enjoyed our fire pit area and chose to have our snack around the fire Barn owls enjoyed watching the fire light, talking about the smells, colours and things they could see. Barn owls then enjoyed eating their snack around the fire and afterwards enjoyed talking about their favourite kind weather! Well done Barn Owls.

New friendships
This week Snowy Owls Scarning have been focusing on the topic of new friendships!
With a recent transition of children at the beginning of the month and some new starters, over the last few weeks we have all been building some fantastic relationships and friendships with our peers and familiar adults.
Throughout the week we have been creating lots of team building and group focused activities to allow the children to continue to build these strong bonds with each other and to encourage skills such as sharing and turn taking resources, it also helps develop their social skills
Today Snowy Owls have really enjoyed crafting and a messy themed tuff tray. Within the tray is a range of kitchen utensils such as weighing scales, spatulas, spoons, sieves and some natural cereals. This has given the children an opportunity to use their motor skills to spoon, mix and pour. They have also used mathematics skills to weigh the cereals working as a team.
Amongst the craft table today we have had a range of open ended resources such as glitter, googly eyes, tissue paper, glue and much more. The children have freely chosen their resources to stick on to their pictures, sharing and turn taking with the glue sticks. This activity also sparked simple conversations about what the children had created and who their picture was for, showing excitement to take them home!
“This is for my mummy” “I have made a dinosaur” “Look at all this cereal” “It goes crunch, crunch”

Yoga and Mindfulness
At Little Owls, we love taking part in weekly yoga and mindfulness sessions, and today Snowy Owls Toftwood have enjoyed doing some!
The children loved copying the poses such as the Sunshine pose the Lion pose and the tree pose as well as taking part in some mindful breathing, using the cuddly toys as a visual representation of the changes exercise makes on our bodies!

Today out Barn Owls children enjoyed a wonderful story read by Holly. Our story this week was about our happiness bucket. This story was called “have you filled your bucket today”
This story explored feelings and emotions and how we can make ourselves happy by making other people happy. We talked about filling our buckets with happiness and ways of keeping our buckets full and what we can do to fill others’ buckets with happy things.
After the story we all joined our key groups where we got to colour our very own buckets and think of things we could put into our buckets to make us feel happy.
“Smiling makes me happy”
“Pink makes me happy”
“I like playing with babies “
“My daddy”
“”I love you”
“Cuddle people”
Thank you Holly, we enjoyed that story very much and it made us all happy.

Old McDonald Had A Farm
This week in Snowy Owls Toftwood we have been exploring our theme of Animals in a farmyard sensory tray!
Decorated with hay and glitter, our farmyard is filled with lots of fun animals to spot and talk about, like a pig, cow, and sheep!
We enjoyed talking about what animals might live on the farm, and any others we have seen on personal visits to the farm parks!
Well done Snowy Owls.

This week Snowy Owls Scarning are focusing on the topic of “People who help us”
The children have recently shown a real interest within the small world area so we have incorporated this into our activity for the day whilst also focusing on our theme of the week!
Today we have created a tuff tray focused on the emergency services, we have used cereal as a textured base to create vehicle tracks and marks with our pallet roads. We have also included a tower building that involves both the police and fire service
Snowy Owls have really enjoyed exploring this tray throughout the day using small world people and emergency vehicles to extend their imaginative skills and play. It has also been a great opportunity for Snowy Owls to hold conversations about their families and what occupations their mummy’s and daddy’s do! We have also discussed what noises the emergency vehicles make when they pass, experiencing these sounds whilst out in the road garden
All of the children showed great turn taking skills and initiated role play skills between each other whilst maintaining focus and high levels of energy and fascination!
Well done Snowy Owls
“Nee naw” “Blue flashy lights” “very loud” “put’s out fire”