Welcome back Dragonflies!

December is upon us and we’re getting into the festive spirit here in Dragonflies!

Our focus this week has been around our Animal Kingdom Topic and we’ve learnt all about Reindeer’s! The children have enjoyed sitting in group showing their good looking skills whilst exploring to our book 5 Little Reindeer. As well as, singing and dancing along to our song Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer!

Our little helpers assisted their teachers in decorating our Classroom on Tuesday to get into the Christmas Spirit! The children loved exploring our new item ‘Tinsel’ and there were able to use their sense of touch to explore the different materials our decorations had to offer! During this session, participated in some Intensive Interaction. We saw lots of lovely facial expressions, eye contact and laughter from our children!

During our Art Session, the children were given the opportunity to create their very own Rudolph! The Children sat together and took turns with the materials in order to create their Reindeer. The children were able to spread the paint in different ways, showing lots of creativity. Our Dragonflies were able to place red material on their Rudolph’s nose independently. They had been doing super listening and looking to our book and songs!

Our Children showed us they’re keen Gardeners this week as we’ve introduced our Christmas Plant to our class. Great turn taking was seen as our children sat patiently to wait for their turn to water our plant. Also, good Fine Motor Skills were seen by all of our Children in order to squeeze the spray bottle to get the water out!

Of course, it wouldn’t be Dragonflies class without a bit of Messy Play! Our children were given the chance to freely explore the plant colours Green and Red. This week we took our shoes and socks off and used our feet to spread the paint! All our children copied really well with this and finished off the activity with some Turn Taking to sprinkle some glitter!

This weeks Sensory Session was based around our edible Rudolph Tuff Tray. Our Dragonflies were exposed to a range of different textures such as, Oats, Weetabix, Cherries, Cookies, raisins and chocolate drops. The children independently explored all these materials and enjoyed having a munch on them too!

Our Star of the Week is Nathan! Nathan has showed good turn taking and a good level of eye contact! Well Done Nathan, you Superstar!

Well Done Dragonflies on another excellent week! Hope you have a lovely weekend! See you all Monday! 😊

Good Morning Dragonflies,

What a cold and snowy morning! This is what it looks like outside my window:

Can you see the icicles? How many are there?

We will miss seeing you all today but here are some ideas to keep you busy!

Wrap up warm and go out into the snow. What can you build with the snow? Can you make a snow ball? How far can you throw it? How high can you throw it?

If you have any paint at home take this outside and paint the snow!

What can you see outside today? Look for icicles, snowmen, footprints in the snow, people scraping ice from their cars or clearing their drives. What sounds can you hear?

You could bring some snow inside. Play with it as it melts, maybe a grown up can mix some food colouring and water for you to add to the snow.

After all of this fun, have a warm snack – practice spreading butter onto toast, you are all getting good at this in school! Have lots of soapy fun helping with the washing up; again, I know you all like soapy water and bubbles!

Our story this week is ‘Five Little Reindeer’. Can you make sets of 5? Go on a ‘Scavenger Hunt’ to find anything ‘red’ around the house.

Listen to the song ‘Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’.

If you are feeling active, dance around to some of our favourtie songs:

-‘D D D Dragonfly’ Pinkfong

-‘Days of The Week’ The Singing Walrus

-‘Shake Your Sillies Out’ The Learning Station

-‘Freeze Dance’ The Kiboomers

Have a fabulous, fun filled, super snowy day everyone! Take care and wrap up warm 🙂

From your Dragonfly Teachers

This week our Dragonflies have been learning about all things Horses! Our weekly song has been Horsey Horsey Don’t You Stop! Our children have showed their excellent sitting daily to listen to our Horsey song!

Whilst listening to our song, our children were given the opportunity to choose their instruments. This highlighted their growing communication skills as our children are getting more confident with their Choice Making, Makaton Signing and Verbal Communication. Also, they were able to wait patiently for their turn to choose within a group setting.

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Horse Shoes were made by our Dragonflies, they independently handled the paint and finger printed their patterns on their Horse Shoes. This activity highlighted our Dragonflies good concentration skills and good looking skills.

Fridays Sensory session was enjoyed by all our Dragonflies. Once again they all coped well with the materials presented and were able to explore the sensory areas independently and confidently.

This week our children have been working hard with their adults on their own individual targets, they’re all showing a real improvement with sitting at their work areas and concentrating on different activities.

We have introduced Teeth Cleaning this week in our class, within just a week of doing this our children are getting more comfortable with the new equipment (tooth brushes and paste). We were very impressed!

Our Star of the Week is Kealan! Kealan has showed great communication skills this week by signing ‘More.’

Well Done Dragonflies! Have a Great Weekend, see you on Monday!

This week our focus has been around the song Baa Baa Black Sheep. Our children have done a variety of different arts, sensory and problem solving activities all based around our new animal the Sheep! We’ve explored colours through colour matching and different textures such as, wool and cotton wool. 

Our Sheep Sensory Tuff Tray gave our Dragonflies the opportunity to explore Shaving Foam. Our children ‘sheared’ our foam sheep in order to problem solve what was underneath. They sat fantastically as a group during this activity, again highlighting their growing relationship skills and attention skills.

Our Dragonflies have amazed us this week with their growing independence skills. They’re now fully settled into the morning routines meaning they’re able to remove their coats and find their lockers to put their belongings away! We are now working towards our children being able to take their shoes and socks off and on. They have made such progress since September and we’re so proud!

We rounded our week off with our Children in Need Day! Our Children had the opportunity to take part in a range of activities all Pudsey related! Lots of Arts and Crafts were enjoyed by our little Dragonflies and our cooking lesson saw us decorate our biscuits into Pudsey Bears!

Finally, our Oakwood Star of the Week this week was Jayden! Jayden has impressed us all this week with his hard work, good sitting and growing independence skills! Well done Jayden!

Have a Lovely Weekend Dragonflies! See you on Monday! 😊

Another week completed for our little Dragonflies and we can’t wait to share what we’ve been up too!

The children have been introduced to their new song and story book, Old MacDonald Had a Farm! We’ve took part in some arts and crafts relating to all the animals found on Old Macdonalds’ farm, which has helped develop our Dragonflies fine motor skills, hand-eye co-ordination and pencil grip skills!

So, it was only right that Wednesday Sensory was all things farm related! Our Dragonflies used a whole range of sensory materials to create their own Farm. We saw their growing problem solving skills to choose the most suitable materials for each part of their farm. As always, our Dragonflies sat beautifully together, displaying their good sitting skills and are getting better every week at sharing and communicating with each other!

Remembrance Day.

Dragonflies were introduced to this very special day on Thursday. We explored everything Poppy Day themed, our PE session was based around a Sensory poppy field and a Poppy Parachute. The children built on their sensory needs and are really enjoying exploring different equipments and materials. During our Poppy Parachute session, our children worked together to make our Poppies fly into the air!

Our amazing TA Jo created a sensory Tuff Pit that was perfect for our Dragonflies to capture a glimpse of Poppy Day. They had a wonderful time individually exploring our new sensory item, Flour. We saw some lovely facial expressions, sounds and eye contact as our children explored their Poppy Tuff Pit. This was a beautiful way for our children to have a part of Remembrance Day, thank you so much Jo!

As part of our Remembrance Day, our Dragonflies cooking lesson was to decorate a Poppy Biscuit. Some of our children were able to follow simple verbal instructions to create their Poppy. Good sitting and good looking was displayed by all of our children during this weeks cooking lesson!

And finally, Friday saw the return of our Oakwood Superstar Assembly. Our Superstar this week was Zoya, fir excellent participation all week! Well Done Zoya, keep up the good work!

As you can see our Dragonflies have been very busy this week, well done everyone! Have a lovely weekend, see you all Monday!

This week in Dragonflies we’ve been busy celebrating all things Diwali and Bonfire themed! Our children have been busy doing a whole range of sensory activities and we can’t wait to share it all with you! 

Our little Dragonflies explored all things Diwali at the beginning of this week. We used our Arts and Crafts Skills to make Diwali lamps which worked on our Creative and Fine Motor Skills. Our Dragonflies were exposed to lots of different colours and materials during this art session and it was enjoyed by all! 

Wednesday Sensory this week was focused on celebrating Diwali. Our tuff pit included various textures and items for our children to explore and build on their sensory needs. They had a wonderful time sorting through the objects, problem solving how to open our gold wrapped chocolate coins! Also, the children worked well together again this week, they all coped well sitting together and sharing the materials! 

Later in the week we moved onto our celebrations for Bonfire Night! Our Dragonflies once again highlighted their artistic flare making our Catherine Wheel Firework pictures! The children were given a variety of materials to decorate their fireworks with and they explored these independently! We had a firework glitter explosion during this session and the children loved this intensive interaction, lots of facial expressions, laughs and smiles were seen! 

Our Dragonflies chef’s have returned this week for our cooking lesson and we made Chocolate Sparklers! Our children handled the materials with full confidence and are really coping well sitting around the table together! We had fun tasting the bread sticks and chocolate, mixing them both together on the bread stick with sprinkles. They made a tasty snack for our Dragonflies! 

To round the week off we had Firework Sensory Friday! Our children had a fabulous 5th of November exploring all things fireworks! Firstly, we filled our tuff tray with colourful shaving foam for our children to enjoy exploring all the colours and textures. We had some great intensive interaction during this session, our Dragonflies communication skills were glowing! 

To finish of our week, we had a Music and Bonfire Sensory Session in the Hall. Our Children independently explored the materials in the tray and enjoyed interacting with their adults. Also, our Dragonflies made lots of Firework Bangs and Sounds with our musical instruments, which they really enjoyed and handled the instruments and sounds really well! 

As you can see we’ve had a really Fun and Busy week in Dragonflies and once again our Children have impressed us all with their hard work! 

Please note, that Wednesday is our swimming day (10/11/21). 

We hope you all have a Wonderful Weekend and Stay Safe on this Bonfire Night! Enjoy Dragonflies! 🎆🎇 

This week our Dragonflies have been very busy doing all things Halloween! We’ve worked together in groups and individually to learn even more fabulous skills! Not forgetting our walkathon to celebrate Oakwood’s 50th Birthday! We can’t wait for you to have a look at all of our Halloween fun! 

To begin our Halloween celebrations we introduced our weekly song, ‘The Spider on the Floor.’The children had fun interacting with our toy spiders and following the actions. Linking with our song we made spiders and spider webs. Our Dragonflies used their developing fine motor skills to use out art materials to create their spooky pictures! They were exposed to glitter to create our spiders web which was a new texture and all our children coped brilliantly! 

Our Dragonflies showed us their cooking skills this week and didn’t we just have a great time! The children sat wonderfully in a group and are beginning tolerate taking turns. Cooking equipment was handled very confidently by our young chefs, we worked on our stirring and spoon handling this week. 

Messy play this week was obviously Halloween based! Our children were exposed to a handful of materials in our sensory bin such as, lentils, pumpkin, jelly and rice crispies. The Dragonflies once again loved working in a group setting and are really handling sharing the materials and exploring the textures! 

Friday Halloween sensory was throughly enjoyed by all our children! They were given to opportunity to explore all our spooky materials and items. Our children really enjoyed some Intensive Interaction with their adults to build on their communication skills. They were given free time to explore the sensory materials individually and all handled the items brilliantly. 

The walkathon gave our Dragonflies the chance to have fun celebrating Oakwood’s 50th Birthday. They chased the bubbles and completed their laps without even realising. 

Have a wonderful Half Term Dragonflies! We’ll see you all in a week! 

This week we’ve been very busy in Dragonflies doing all things to celebrate Harvest Festival!

All our Dragonflies had a wonderful time exploring the different textures of our Harvest ingredients in our Sensory Bin. Our children are beginning to enjoy working together and sitting taking part in a variety of group activities.

Everyone enjoyed getting messy during our sweetcorn painting session. There were lots of smiles and anticipation as the bubble wrap was popped. The children independently accessed a range of painting utensils to create their own sensory sweetcorn picture. This activity was a fantastic opportunity to further develop those all important fine motor skills.

This week we’ve introduced our afternoon sensory sessions. Our first session focused on Harvest. The children amazed us all with how independently they engaged throughout these sessions.

Welcome back to Dragonflies!

Are you ready to look at all the wonderful activities we’ve been busy with?

It was Zoyas birthday last month. We had cake, music and dancing. Zoya and her friends had so much fun!

Last week the children decorated cakes as part of our Macmillan Coffee Morning. They demonstrated excellent choice making skills and took turns to share the equipment.

We also got very messy making our harvest pictures.

The children have also been working individually on their problem solving skills. Activities have included, counting, exploring colour and pattern and handling a variety of textures.

Our topic is Animal Kingdom and we’ve been finding out all about bears. The children created brown bear pictures using forks to spread the paint. We’ve learnt a new dance to our Panda song . The children explored black and white objects, sorted black and white pictures and made a beautiful panda bear display. They have also listened and joined in with the story song Going on a Bear Hunt.

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We’re all so proud of how hard our little Dragonflies are working. Well done everyone!

The Dragonflies are now all settled in their new class and are amazing us all with how hard they are working.

This week the children have joined in with lots of physical activities and explored different ways of moving.Some enjoyed swinging,others working to balance and kick the ball’s,and others running and sliding!

Finally we had a group session learning all about the colour yellow.This links to our story of the 5 Little Ducks.

The children explored yellow items before choosing an instrument to join in with the song Yellow Submarine!

They then worked creatively to complete’Yellow’ Collages using different materials!

Another lovely busy week!

Have wonderful weekend!
Dragonflies Team.