Week Beginning 12th May 2026

The Investigation Hub at Sidney Grove

Characteristics of Effective Learning

This week the children have been keen to display their creativity and critical thinking – acting as fashion designers and choosing and cutting different materials to create their own personalised designs. Using their own images created such ownership of this activity which developed fine motor skills and allowed the children to make choices linked to the colour, pattern and texture of materials. Who knows, this activity may have ignited a passion for a future career in fashion!

Parents as Partners

Our children in the Investigation Hub were lucky enough to have a visit from Helen who brought some lovely resources to teach the children all about the importance of caring for their teeth. They showed amazing engagement and interest and were excited to have a turn cleaning the giant teeth. We hope you can see the benefit of this session at home as caring for teeth and eating a balanced diet is so important for a healthy lifestyle. We know the children listened carefully as someone told Ellie that she shouldn’t be having a Kit Kat for her lunch. Poor Ellie loves a Kit Kat but has promised the children she will only have one occasionally!

Our oldest children have also had the opportunities to ascribe meaning to marks and we are seeing more and more marks which represent recognisable letters, which is so lovely to see. We certainly know our children have all the skills and qualities needed to get off to a flying start in their chosen Reception class and we will be supporting the children with this transition over the coming weeks. 

Outside Learning

We have noticed children developing a real fascination for sticks outdoors. We love to encourage the use of open ended resources to support learning in this way and the humble stick supported Susan to develop some amazing mathematical thinking through play. The children were choosing sticks to measure different objects outdoors and decided they wanted to measure Susan. Susan introduced the vocabulary ‘taller’ and shorter’ and the children discovered a problem. They realised that the sticks they had found were shorter than Susan and worked together to find a solution, joining sticks together using masking tape. Three sticks proved to be the magic length to be taller than Susan and Keira. Such fabulous use of language to support communication and thinking!

If you are out and about this weekend, perhaps you might find a measuring stick of your own to use together!

Wishing you all lovely family weekend! We look forward to seeing you on Monday.