Goodbye February ... Hello March!!!
Date: 27th Feb 2022 @ 1:14pm
Well, here we are, another half term complete and, after numerous ‘enhanced measures’ and isolations, we are starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Who would have thought a few weeks ago that I would be writing this following a week where we have allowed children to bounce (un-socially distanced) on a bouncy castle??!! Obviously, we are continuing to remain cautious with plenty of handwashing etc. etc. and covid precautions have almost become second nature to us all, but it is exciting to think what new opportunities we can look forward to now that we are less restricted in club.
Since our last blog we have celebrated Christmas. Waffle the Elf got up to all sorts of mischief ...
... but didn't stop us enjoying our advent tree, making masks, writing letters to Santa, baking mince pies, stitching stockings, and making cards, crackers, and reindeer food, as well as dressing up for Christmas Jumper Day ...
...and having fun at our Christmas party on the last day of term.
As soon as we returned in January, we couldn't wait to make New Year hats, calendars, resolutions and wish wands before enjoying a number of Winter arts, crafts and baking including snow painting, northern lights chalk art, snow globes and melted snowman biscuits.
January also brought with it Winnie the Pooh Day (where we made masks, bookmarks and pooh sticks), Penguin Appreciation Day (where we made popping penguins) and Australia Day (where we made masks, booklets and aboriginal dot paintings) soon followed. Australia Day became quite an occasion this year with children competed in a very successful koala competition …in fact it was so successful that the prize of one koala soon became 2 with both children becoming very worthy winners. A Lego Theme Night completed January where children wore masks for the entire night as well as watching the Lego Movie whilst taking part in competitions and making moveable puppets.
With February came Chinese New Year and the year of the tiger where we made masks, booklets, lanterns, and a Chinese dragon, and ate fortune cookies and Chinese food, before spending a week learning about the Winter Olympics where we made Olympic torches, mini skiers, Olympic panda mascots, decorative ice skates and marshmallow snow sweets.
Valentine’s day brought with it lots of love and friendship crafts and activities including love heart cupcakes, cards, friendship lollipop flowers and kindness calendars. In conjunction with kindness day and children’s mental health week we took the opportunity to address some of the anxieties being felt by several children due to enhanced measures and differing rules surrounding the lifting of covid restrictions Children made worry boxes, wrote in diaries, and worked their way through some of the various crafts and activities in our ever growing ‘wellbeing’ library.
Not only have we had several after school sports clubs on offer this half term, but we are also pleased to announce that we now have a permanent sports coach on site who has also been able to deliver morning dodgeball sessions (which have been extremely popular) and is going to run several sports clubs this coming half term including tennis which is a first for Woodlands.
As I complete this blog, we have just enjoyed a busy half term holiday club where we not only created a number of Encanto based arts and crafts (not to mention numerous viewings of the film) but also spent much of the week bouncing on inflatables, baking cakes and biscuits and getting messy with slime. We also welcomed approx. 30 budding footballers to our football camp (along with 3 crazy sports coaches) which was a great success (despite the freezing cold weather). We never did quite make it to the park (the weather was a bit questionable to say the least) but I can safely say it was a hugely popular week. Thank goodness we have 5 weeks to prepare for the next one!!!
