What a wonderful start to a brand new half term… the opening of our track! The children have absolutely loved practising their cycling skills on different vehicles including trikes, scooters, cars and push bikes. The new track allows the children to practise managing risks, negotiating space and working together. We do, however, have a bit of a problem with the traffic light installation… it always seems to be causing long delays!
This excitement continued into the classroom, where the children found a mysterious map… it told us to look for the chest… after some searching using our positional language knowledge, we discovered a chest with our new class book inside! The Night Pirates told us a story about a group of pirates sailing a… house? The children enjoyed that the pirate ship wasn’t one that you would expect, which inspired them to think of other things that could be used as a ship! We had suggestions and designs depicting banana boats, trailer boats, kingdom boats, and even a Spongebob boat!
The children have been really engaged with our new text, and have enjoyed making links with other areas of their learning, including digging for treasures in the digging pit, playing ‘hide the chest’, exploring in the forest, and drawing out maps, arrows and ‘X’s to indicate the loot!
Tales toolkit this week found ‘Julian the Shark’ (who was minding his own business splashing through the sea foam and under the water) in great danger! A ship above his head had lost some of its cargo and trapped him on the sea floor. Luckily, Incy Wincy and Spider Fish were close by, and managed to set Julian the Shark free using their sticky webs to pull the logs away.
The children recorded their story this week using labels and illustrations. Phonics is proving to be a brilliant tool to support the children with their independent writing! Ash class have learnt air ure er ow (as in ‘blow’) this week, and Saplings have been totally wowing us with the retention of their newly learnt sounds l j v w. The application of this knowledge, and prior phonics learning, meant that the children could write labels such as sh-ar-k, f-oa-m and initial sounds representing the words log and web.
Spring is starting to emerge in our garden and the children have been noticing different signs of the changing seasons this week. Using magnifying glasses and fact files, the children set to work spotting and identifying the spring bulbs that have been popping up all around. We concluded that most of the bulbs were daffodils, but some looked a bit different. The children also practised using their estimating skills that we have been learning about in maths, supposing that there may be “about 30, maybe” daffodils in just one spot! With a bit of concentrating, we enjoyed giving our best guesses for estimates, and then checking by counting. We have also been having a go at observational drawings of the different signs of spring and developing our illustrative skills.
