Weekly Activities. Book of the week - The Detective Dog

Book of the week: The Detective Dog by Julia Donaldson.

Synopsis: Peter's dog Nell has an amazing sense of smell. Whether it's finding a lost shoe or discovering who did a poo on the new gravel path, her ever-sniffing nose is always hard at work. But Nell has other talents too…

Every Monday she goes to school with Peter and listens to children read. So who better to have on hand when they arrive one morning to discover that the school's books have all disappeared! Who could have taken them? And why?

There's only one dog for the job ... and Detective Dog Nell is ready to sniff out the culprit!

Activities: After reading our book of the week, we got to work making our own police badges so the children could act out the story and become junior detectives for the day! To make the badges we started by cutting some wood with a hand saw either into rectangles or discs, depending on which shape the children preferred. We then sanded the wood using sandpaper to remove any sharp or 'pointy' bits. Some of the children decided to drill some holes in their wood using a hand drill. We showed the children a digital image of a Metropolitan Police badge for them to copy or get ideas on how to colour or paint their badges. When the children had finished decorating their badges we played at being detectives and set them challenges to find various objects we had hidden around the site.

Leading on from making the police badges we gave the children some cards which had images of various animal footprints which they had to try and match to the animals that made them.

Later in the week we had a lot of rain and the nursery got very muddy. As well as having enormous fun jumping and playing in muddy puddles, we decided to make a very large mud painting. We talked to the children about different art techniques and ended up making our own interpretation of a Jackson Pollock abstract expressionist painting which definitely brought out the children's' creative sides.