Song of the week: Making Pancakes by Sue Bleazard (please help your child to sing along).
A bit about Sue: Sue Bleazard is a freelance music teacher in a primary school in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She's been writing songs for children throughout her teaching career and started sharing them online in 2016. On her YouTube channel (SingKids!) is a free resource bank of children's songs for educators where you will find lots of songs based on primary curriculum subjects, books, stories, values and celebrations. The songs are grouped in playlists, for; Early Years, KS1, KS2, whole school songs for assemblies and times-tables.
Link to SingKids! https://www.youtube.com/c/suebleazardsingkids/featured
Weekly Activities: It was Shrove Tuesday this week so decided to make our own pancakes at snack time instead of our usual fruit and vegetables (children who were lactose intolerant or didn't want them were given alternative snacks but were still able to join in and enjoy the activity). Before we set about making our pancakes, we spent a lot of time going through our fire safety procedure..
This first thing to do was to clear the area of any leaves, twigs, branches or anything else that could catch fire from a spark and also make sure there was nothing overhanging the area or that was too close. We then let the children have a go using a flint and steel over a bucket of water so they could see how to make sparks that would eventually start the fire. We ensured that seating was a suitable distance from the fire and we talked about good behaviour around the fire which included:
never running, always walking around the fire
never touching the fire, even when it had gone out
always going around the fire area rather than across the middle
only the adults could tend the fire once it had started using fire gloves
ensuring we had a bucket of water nearby
never leaving the fire unattended
We talked about how the fire triangle and what was needed for a fire to ignite (oxygen, heat, fuel). To build the fire we collected 3 different sized sticks:- matchstick size , thumb size and pencil size. We also had larger logs to hand that we had chopped into smaller pieces using a hatchet earlier on. We made sure we had all the fuel necessary to hand before starting. We put some cotton wool into the bottom of the fire basket and our matchstick sized sticks on top of that. We then lit the cottonwool using a flint and steel and started to add larger sized sticks once the fire got going, slowly building up to the larger logs.
To make our pancakes we used the one cup formula which was great for teaching the children about different measures:
1 cup of flour
1.5 cups of milk
1 egg
Mix together!
Once the flames had died down we put a little of the mixture in our little pancake pan and watched as the pancakes cooked though, tossing them half way through. The children then got to enjoy the pancakes at snack-time.
After the fire was out and had cooled down, we used the leftover charcoal to draw and make marks with so nothing went to waste.
Other activities this week included collecting and spreading lots of woodchip that we had delivered and we found a furry friend that some of the children wanted to let crawl on their coats (arachnophobia warning: there are a couple of pictures towards the bottom of a spider on the children's coat arms).
Home Activity: Learn a new song with movements to get your child active in a fun way using the BBC Teach - EYFS Wiggle Waggle resource.
Wiggle Waggle is a movement and literacy series. The key aim of the series is to provide a resource which will help to fulfil learning objectives of the Early Years Foundation Stage of the National Curriculum - and, in particular, to foster:
Personal, social and emotional development
Communication, language and literacy skills
Physical development