This term we welcomed 7 new turtles to our 'nest': Dylan, Estera, Lelianna, Jaishnavi, Henry, Ellis and Archie who have all settled beautifully, thanks to the kindness and helpfulness of our 'old' Turtles!  These Turtles loved taking them under their wing and showing them where the toys and resources were.  We even heard one little Turtle whisper to their new friend 'That's the Tidy Up Song..... now we put these away, it's boring, but if we don't we can't find them later!'                                                 

Children's Mental Health Week saw us exploring emotions 'Know Yourself, Grow Yourself'.  We made some smelly peppermint playdough that helped to relax us just by holding it and taking in the aroma of peppermint and if we are feeling really cross we could squash it as hard as we can and squash those feelings away!  We also played a game where our faces displayed an emotion and our friends had to guess if we were 'happy', 'sad', 'cross', 'excited' or 'scared'.

Our physical skills continued to develop through our PE lessons and by being constantly active.  Our gross motor skills are helped by moving in a range of ways from being outside on the bikes, which also helps our develop our spatial awareness, to dancing to music. 

We have been embracing 'Squiggle Time' daily.  This is the time of day when the Turtles, use their 'flipper flappers' to move to lively music; we then transfer these movements to paper using pencils in both hands.  The purpose of this is because it works both gross and fine motor muscles, and strengthens and trains muscles for the purpose of forming letters in readiness for writing.

Circle time continues to play an important part of our communication and language skills, where everyone gets time to talk about something that is special or important to them.  Through our ice topic we have learnt some new vocabulary and made some sentences using these new words, ...' Ice is slippery' ...'Warm water melts the ice!'..... Our Talk4Writing story made us think and talk about what we may see on a train ride when looking out of the window and our Turtles have certainly been on some amazing train rides, seeing tunnels, fire engines, dinosaurs, a T.Rex in particular, lions, tigers and even a unicorn flying around!