Our activities have been linked to the topic, ‘Flowers & Insects’ and we have focussed on sunflowers and spiders this week. 🌻🕷

We’ll start with showing our wonderful artists! Of course, when they are all finished and up on display, we will photograph it to share with you.

We can’t wait to grow our own sunflowers now! I wonder who’s will grow the tallest? 🌻
We have enjoyed singing one of our favourite rhymes, Incy Wincy and loved looking at the sparkly pictures in the book Arrrrrgh Spider. It’s all about a spider who would like to be a family pet. He chooses a family but they are scared of spiders until they see his beautiful webs! We enjoyed decorating Oreo biscuits to make them into spiders for cooking, we watched Vicky make a sparkly webs with glue and glitter in Bucket Time (Attention Autism) and then all had a go at doing our own. We also looked for spiders and other insects in our pasta and edible soil tuff trays. We even found a real spider and had a close look at him in our insect pot! We called him, Mr Skinny Legs like the one from Peppa Pig!

And finally, here are our Superstars this week! Kaiden has been developing his independence over the last few weeks and is beginning to use a fork to feed himself!

Lana is our Superstar again this week too. She has been working so hard in her communication sessions with an adult and she was absolutely fantastic in an activity on Thursday with a less familiar Aided Language Display (ALD).

Look forward to seeing you all on Monday 😃 bye bye 👋👋

I’m sorry we haven’t had a blog for a little while. Vicky had Covid in the Easter break and felt really poorly so everything has been behind till now! 🙁🤒 Anyway she’s all better now and it’s been great seeing all our little caterpillars again. 😃

We’ve all settled back into school really well and we’ve had some familiar and new fun activities to keep us busy!
I’ll start with our two superstars and then put some pictures of some of our activities. 🌟🌟

Our focus this week has been all about Eid. Maryam showed us lots of special things in our activity tray. We all found the items interesting. The prayer mats had beautiful patterns and textures and it was fun trying on scarves and hats. We liked handling and looking at the books and prayer beads too.

We have enjoyed learning all about Eid. We even had Mehndi face painting on our hands and picked colour dabbers to use to decorate a hand outline and record our learning.

We had lots of fun with blue and white paint, glue and glitter. When the paper plates were dry, the adults used templates to make our wonderful paintings into Eid themed decorations. They are going to hang up in our classroom! 🌙 ⭐️

We’ve really enjoyed getting back to the forest too! 🌲🌳🌳🌲🌳 Our new topic is Flowers & Insects so we are going to be looking for pretty flowers and all our favourite minibeasts over the next few weeks. 🌸🌼🕷🐞🐝🪱🐜🪲🪰🐌🐛🦋

Amazing work Caterpillars! 🐛 ✨ See you all on Monday! Bye bye 👋

We hope you are giving your Mummies lots of cuddles and have given your special cards and presents that we made. Don’t worry if you have been at home poorly…we will keep them safe until you come back to school! I’ve put some pictures on so you can give her a sneaky peek of the special artwork keepsake we made.
We had fun learning how to mix powder paint with water. We made colours that would be lovely for our purple tulip pictures. We explored mixing colours and making patterns, creating process art that our adults would use to create the individual originals!

We’ve been super busy this week and we’ve enjoyed lots of our familiar activities as well as some very special treats and events. We have shared a collection of photos which show us enjoying our kindness and Valentine’s Day activities. We are also really enjoying the new story and we’ve been great at listening, attending and concentrating on the text and the resources when we do story time in small and large group time! There was no official superstar this week, as we were having a Valentine’s Disco on Friday but as you will see, Caterpillar Class are all Superstars this week! 🌟

Vicky is going to record the story Monkey and Me especially for Caterpillars when we get back to school but if you want to share it over half term, have a look on the home learning section of the blog (Oakwood at home). If you go into stories you will see a recording for Squirrels Class from last year. There are lots of lovely stories there. You can go back and watch Vicky tell you the Hungry Caterpillar story too.

🏡 Home learning challenge: Please enjoy having a dance and singing along to this fun recording of 5 Little Monkeys we’ve been sharing this week.
If you can find a monkey to bring into school on Monday when we come back, we are going to share the story and invite all of our monkeys to help us! 🐵

Have a great half term!

Yet another busy but fun week in Caterpillars! This week we have had a Tiger Tea Party where we made our own sandwiches and cakes! Of course we had real tigers in the classroom as you can see in the picture below! 🐅

We’ve also loved a water play session linked to the story, an NSPCC Number Day and our first trip to the cooking room!

We practiced pouring water from the teapot before the tiger came and drank it all!

On Friday we had our Number Day to raise funds for the NSPCC.

On Fridays, when it is not our turn to work with Bev for Music, we will be doing some more cooking activities. This week we went to the Cooking Room at Rushall. We made an Angel Delight with sprinkles! We were brilliant and all coped amazingly with the transition and going to a new place to do an activity!

We have had two birthdays this week too…

Our Superstar this week was Richard! Well done for some fantastic communication work 🌟

We will still enjoy some Tiger Activities but next week we will be moving onto one of Vicky’s favourite stories, Monkey and Me! It’s got lots of animals in but it’s all about a little girl taking her favourite toy monkey to the zoo🐒

🏡 Our Home Learning Challenge this week is to watch the following Singing Hands number song below which we’ll be sharing as well and if you have a anything that we can share in class featuring a monkey (a toy, a book, a hat, a picture etc), maybe you would like to bring it in this week to launch our new story and introduce our sign? If you would prefer to send me a photo just send it to vnoakes@oakwood.walsall.sch.uk and let me know in the diary so I can download it before our session. Thank you 🐵

We have had lots of fun learning about Chinese New Year this week. We tasted some Chinese food, enjoyed a Chinese New Year tuff tray with orange rice and even had a go at using chopsticks. We also made a fabulous dragon with all of our handprints and some beautiful lanterns too.

As it is the year of the tiger, our story was, ‘The Tiger That Came To Tea’ so we had lots of activities linked to tigers and we have even sponsored a tiger with WWF.

We hope you enjoy the photos…

We learned that 2022 is the year of the tiger!

There was a bit of confusion over the sign…some of us have been adding stripe gestures or big paws but we have got to the bottom of it and the most recent sign for tiger is gesturing lots of whiskers!

We loved making these terrific tigers. We will be having a terrifying tiger display!

It was very exciting opening our special parcel. Our very kind tiger, that we have sponsored with WWF, has sent us some photos and a copy of the book with a little soft toy of the tiger from the story.

Vicky shared the story this week but next week we are going to watch a special retelling of the story by Singing Hands, so we will put it on this week’s blog so that you can have a sneaky peek at lots of children and adults signing the story. Look out for Mr Tumble!!

This week we had a Super Superstar!!

We also had another birthday this week! Happy 5th Birthday Kaiden!! We hope you enjoyed your day. We know you had a great evening with all of your family. I bet you had some great presents. What a big boy you are now!

Thank you for all your wonderful home learning contributions! We couldn’t resist sharing these lovely moments…

We will have another home learning task next week. We hope you all have a lovely relaxing weekend and we look forward to seeing you for lots more fun and adventures on Monday.

PS. We also have another staff birthday coming up soon so we just might be having a tiger tea party in the week as this birthday falls at the weekend! Don’t forget to give Maryam a big birthday hug on Friday ready for her weekend birthday! Shhhhhhhh

Speaking of fun, we’ll start with our fun loving star of the week, Lola. She has been joining in with group activities so beautifully. You can see her in the pictures below dancing with her friends in PE. She also comes and sits amongst her friends, with no prompts, to get ready for bucket time (I’ll share more about that activity next week), the caterpillar snack cafe and lunchtimes.
Well done Lola! 🌟

Before we show you some pictures from the week and share our home learning activity, we have also had a birthday on Friday. Happy Birthday to Lana! 🎉 🎈🥳

We’ve have also got one of our special adults having a birthday on Tuesday so don’t forget to give her a birthday hug when you arrive at school. Happy Birthday Amanda. We love you!

Here are some collages of everybody completing some more fantastic animal art. We can’t wait to display it all and create our very own Animal Boogie Kingdom in the classroom. Amanda is even making a jeep so we can pretend to go through the jungle looking for animals. We can’t wait to show you it all!

We think we have some talented artists in Caterpillars. Everybody is enjoying the painting activities!

So finally, next week we will still have fun doing the Animal Boogie but we are going to introduce a new story called The Tiger That Came To Tea. It ties in with our learning about the Chinese New Year as it’s the year of the tiger.

Home Learning Challenge 🏡 This week we’d love you to find something to do with tigers and bring it to show us 🐅 It can be a cuddly or some other sort of toy, a book, a picture from a magazine or one that you find on google. Please can you bring it in with you on Monday to show us in our ‘Show, Share and Sign’ session during Good Morning Time. Don’t forget to ask an adult to put a quick note on the weekend news to say what you’ve brought so we know to look in your bags.

If Mummy and Daddy prefer, they can send a picture of you with your item or doing your home learning challenge. Again, please just put a note on the weekend news so we know to download it before the session. Vicky’s email is vnoakes@oakwood.walsall.sch.uk 📷

Thank you for the wonderful weekend news and updates on the diaries during the week. ☺️

We are absolutely loving the Animal Boogie! There was lots of dancing and engagement with the song and story in Caterpillars this week. There was also some fantastic artwork inspired by the Animal Boogie book and all the wonderful puppet animals. We hope you enjoy looking at our paintings and photos! Don’t forget to look back at last week’s blog if you want to watch the barefoot version we have been using in school.

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Aren’t our paintings amazing!! We can’t wait to put them all up! We’re doing lots more painting and collage next week so that we have all of the animals. Next week we’ll be finishing our flamingo birds and starting our leopards and bears!

Home Learning challenge. Can anyone find a toy (cuddly or small world) animal from the Animal Boogie story and song? If you want to you could take a photo and send it to me you can or if you want to, you could bring it in to our brand new ‘Show, Share and Sign’ activity. Make sure Mummy or Daddy just writes on your diary sheet what you have sent so we can return it home correctly and safely on the day you bring it in.

To finish I will share our Caterpillar superstar. This week we just had to choose Alfie. He did some fantastic talking and vocalising when we were doing our bubbles in the PE cool down. He made some wonderful, ‘p-p-p-p’ sounds and on several occasions during the session said, “pop, pop, pop”! He loved wearing the superstar hat but he had even more fun putting on his adult’s heads! Well done Amazing Alfie 🌟

With that title in mind, I’ll start with our Superstar this week.

🥁 Big drumroll…. it was our Keiks!

Our new topic is called Animal Kingdom so we recapped one of our Nursery Rhymes from last term. We sang and signed Down in the Jungle and then enjoyed doing the Animal Boogie version and created some art work for our display. I’ll add the videos we enjoyed after the pictures.

We have also enjoyed getting back to the Forest this week 🌳 🌲 🌳

The rest of the week has been spent settling back into favourite activities, familiar routines, learning through play and practicing some new life skills. We have even begun to brush our teeth after lunch 🪥

Thank you for some of the wonderful Christmas pictures from home! If you haven’t sent any it’s not too late as we have had some children away at different points in the week so we are going to share them next week.

Camera 📷 Feel free to send any pictures when you want to. You can send to the school postbox or my email is vnoakes@oakwood.walsall.sch.uk

Quick reminder… is just to make sure children have a full change of clothes (including socks) in school everyday please and particularly for Forest days! We look forward to seeing the children for more fun next week. Bye for now 👋

Homework Task!! Some of you have sent some photos to me already but if you haven’t, could you send a couple of our Caterpillars enjoying themselves over Christmas? We are looking to share them on Monday and Tuesday if possible. Email to postbox or vnoakes@oakwood.walsall.sch.uk

Thank you 😊

The children have enjoyed coming back to school and we were so pleased to see their big smiles! It has only been a short week but we have enjoyed quite a few activities. On Wednesday we enjoyed exploring a New Year rice activity. We enjoyed listening to ABBA’s Happy New Year song and watched our friends at Singing Hands sign it. I tried to add the link so you can watch it from our blog but it wouldn’t embed so I’ve done a little picture to help you search it.

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The children have also enjoyed doing some familiar play activities, some dough disco & exploring the track playground that the older children use. We haven’t been able to use our usual outside space as it’s having some very exciting equipment added to it!