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  • Writer's pictureKeith

Weekly Activities. Book of the week - The Wild Woods



Book of the week: The Wild Woods by Simon James.

Synopsis: A heartwarming tale with an important ecological message about respecting an animal's natural habitat.


Grandad and Jess are walking together in the woods when they see a squirrel pass by. Jess wants to take it home with her as a pet, but Grandad says that you can't tame a squirrel. As Jess follows the creature deeper into the woods, she discovers more natural wonders and comes to understand that her grandad is right - the squirrel's proper home is the wild woods.


Main Activity: This weeks main activity was centered around the changing of seasons, going from winter into spring and looking for signs of natural change e.g. buds starting to emerge and trees starting to blossom. We did a spring scavenger hunt, focusing on the letter "S". We hid various objects beginning with the letter "S" around the site and challenged the children to try and find them. We then talked about the phonic sound for the letter "S" and how certain words related. The children decided to draw and paint some of their "S" word items such as a stream, a toy snake and a stick.


Additional Activities:

  • Litter Picking. Relating back to our book of the week, we went litter picking around the church grounds and talked about the importance of respecting an animal's habitat

  • Building a Greenhouse. Now that the weather is starting to warm up, we thought it would be the ideal time to try and grow some flowers and vegetables so that meant building our own greenhouse

  • Superhero Lolly Sticks. Make a caped superhero using lolly sticks, pieces of cut fabric, beads and shells

  • Homemade Dough. We all made a dough mixture together and then the children put their creative hats on and let loose with their imagination and ideas!


Home Activity:

  • Create a cairn

Cairns are man-made towers of natural stones, usually built as a landmark or a memorial, and making them is a great activity for children. All they need to do is gather a range of flat rocks and pebbles in different sizes, and then stack them in order, with the largest at the bottom and the smallest at the top.


Can your child make changes to the structure of their cairn, such as using a foundation of lots of smaller stones, and see if it still stands?


This activity improves gross and fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and concentration as they experiment with finding the stones’ balancing points to see how tall they can make their cairn.


Please upload pictures of your finished cairns to Tapestry.





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