Last week Hopscotch continued their learning through an animal theme by reading one of their favourite books,’ Dear Zoo’ by Rod Campbell.
The children enjoyed exploring how animals look different to each other, and tried to group some animals depending on whether they had spots or stripes. They then used some prints to make their own animal-skin pictures, using printing techniques.
In maths, and during their Concept Cat session, we learnt how to describe how long different snakes were, using lots of maths language; longer, shorter, longest, shortest. We all pretended to be snakes and drew around ourselves on the carpet, and compared our sizes. Some children decided to use blocks to measure.
Our children are becoming skilled at noticing ‘same’ and ‘different’. We used patterned snakes to explain how we could make groups. We even made our own coloured pasta snakes, counting and using repeating patterns.
We explored building a zoo in our construction area. We knew that some animals couldn’t be in the same enclosure as each other as this wouldn’t be safe.
Our children know that physical development is important, not only to keep us healthy but to help us in our writing. We made our bodies into a snake and used the posts to weave in and out. Catching bubbles help us control our arms and improve our hand eye coordination. The children love mark making and liked exploring lines on the large floor paper.
The Hopscotch children became excellent problem solvers when we found some wooden planks. They soon got to work in using them to walk the plank, then work out how we could travel across the benches, using only one plank, moving it each time.
