September News 2020

Throughout the month of September, all of our Monkeys have begun to explore the exciting and wonderful opportunities that the beautiful season of Autumn has provided and had thoroughly loved new discoveries outdoors. We have also supported Jeans for Genes Day which raises awareness for children and families with genetic disorders and also took part in British Nutrition Health Eating Week, promoting healthy eating, lifestyle, and well-being.

Our littlest Monkeys in Blues and Yellows have been exploring messy play and having lots of fun with Weetabix and couscous, emptying and filling containers, and exploring further with cups and spoons. This has been great to develop our fine motor skills. During Healthy Eating week our littlest monkeys explored a variety of fruit and veg and how to use them in a variety of ways such as painting, water play, and printing. Yellow Monkeys, in particular, loved mark-making with different colour crayons, puzzles, looking at pictures, and lots of babbling! Blue Monkeys have been developing their Physical skills, Moving and grooving to the music, songs, and learning the actions to their favourite rhymes.

Our Pink Monkeys have been particularly excited with exploring Fruit and Vegetables in lots of creative ways. We have explored frozen vegetables and used them to create groups by colour which allowed for colour awareness and recognition skills. We also explored the small world, imagination play by using the sand and vegetables to create our own vegetable patch indoors and discussed ideas around ‘Growth and Growing’. A particularly exciting activity which captured the attention of the Pink Monkeys was ‘Root and Vegetable Printing’ We all had a lot of fun looking at the different shapes and patterns that the vegetables created. On Jeans for Genes day, we all wore denim and we had lots of fun creating our own patchwork material, by using a variety of blue materials and glitter!

This month our Pre-schooler’s in Red Monkeys have been exploring a wide variety of opportunities which has supported the learning for the inquisitive Red Monkeys. Both the Chimps and Apes have become excellent explorers in the great- wild, outdoors of our very own garden! They have been searching high and low, for leaves and twigs and have been using them to create sensory, leaf bottles with the help of their carer’s. With the season of Autumn well and truly upon us, we have also used the leaves from the garden to make our own paintings, expertly turning the leaves into- paintbrushes themselves and creating artistic paintings, marks and prints. One of the highlights of this month has been the developing skills of group work, turn-taking and collaboration of the Chimps and Apes to create a large Scarecrow! The children also created their own individual scarecrow and expressed their creativity using plates and hay. Red Monkeys have loved exploring the story- ‘Handa’s Surprise’ by Eileen Browne. The children were able to explore real exotic fruit from the story. As an extension to this experience, we talked about the exotic animals from the story and created a big basket which was a key feature in this well-loved tale.

Another literary experience that the Red Monkeys adored was enjoying the captivating story- ‘The Stick Man’ by Julia Donaldson. Red Monkeys then created their own Stick Man from twigs they had collected from the garden!