Dear Parents,
We have had a
spooky week in the Edgerley Room celebrating Halloween. The children thought
Halloween was just for 'dressing up and going Trick or Treating' however we did
a little research and discovered that Halloween actually originates from the Celtic
pagan festival of Samhain, meaning 'Summer's End'
which celebrated the end of harvest season.
To celebrate, we made
some ghoulish gloop to satisfy our senses and painted some goblins,
ghosts and other scary creatures. Karl brought in a
carved Jack-o'-lantern from home which he had made with his Dad. He
informed us it was to "put on your doorstep and frighten away the
baddies". In our Halloween video we learnt that this popular
tradition originated hundreds of years ago in Ireland, and back then they made
them out of turnips and potatoes rather than pumpkins!
We continued our
explorations into force, using dominoes to create wonderful
domino runs. Who would have thought that with the tap of a finger on
one domino at the start of the line, all the others would follow suit and fall
down, one by one? We also investigated motion using marbles with paint. As we
moved the box holding our marbles in different directions the
marbles created some striking patterns and we captured their pathways
in paint on our paper.
In the outdoors we were excited to notice our tomatoes are growing
with speed. They were so tall and top heavy that they were falling over. So
with old stockings, we carefully tied the plants to the stakes to encourage further
growth to be vertical! We also picked regular new and fresh leaves for
our rapidly growing silk worms to munch on.
Our interest in
symmetry has not yet waned and this week we began some beautiful
symmetrical butterfly creations. Using a variety of coloured collage pieces the
children carefully and patiently produced amazingly
symmetrical butterflies. Not only did they match shapes to create
mirror images, but they also matched the colours. Come and have a
look - they are gorgeous!
Best wishes,
Emma, Mel and
Chris
