“Give me the joys of summer…“

   Winifred Sackville Stoner,

Summer 2

Week beginning  12th June 2023

This week we have been on a mission to catch Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len from the book ‘What the ladybird heard’. We created WANTED posters and displayed them all around school in the hope someone else might have caught a glimpse of the two robbers! In Forest School we found some clues to where the two might be, including one of their hats, boots and a jumper. The next day we wrote some instructions on how we thought we might be able to catch Hefty Hugh and Lanky Len, including digging holes and setting traps! 

In Maths we have been learning about sharing objects out equally.

In Art we have continued to learn about sculpture and took inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy to create our own sculptures using boxes, glass beads, pebbles, wooden blocks to name but a few.

In Science we worked in groups to each study a different area of the school to find minibeasts. We recorded what we found and then compared the results with the other mini habitats seeking for any patterns. We did find lots of woodlice in the dark damp places and flies and bees nearer any flowers.

This week Henrietta delivered the story ‘What the ladybird heard at the seaside’, by Julia Donaldson and Bertie the Bee left us the rhyme, ‘Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home’ in his garden. We soon discovered we were learning about some new topics: ‘Fun at the Seaside!’ and ‘Living things in their habitats’, so on Monday we started with a minibeast hunt around our school grounds. There were lots of bees around the flowers and we soon realised we needed to look underneath leaves and stones to find other little creatures hiding underneath in the cool, dark places. We found a lot of woodlice but we also found a poorly butterfly. However, with a spoon of sugary water it was soon revived and flew off! Back in class we enjoyed finding out more about bugs and explored a range of activities linked to minibeasts.

We used the watercolours to paint pictures, we made homes for bugs in the construction area, we enjoyed counting the plastic bugs and we also continued hunting for them in our outdoor classroom.

On Friday, we finished the week by attending a Music Festival. We travelled to Badsey First School on a coach to join 6 other schools to sing, dance, draw, move,  make music and have fun, all based around the theme of pirates and the sea. We had an amazing time and we have learned lots of new songs and thoroughly enjoyed dancing the pirate conga to round off the morning!

In our Art lesson, we have started to look at mouldable materials and explored clay, plasticine and play dough and what we could do with them. We made ‘crazy minibeasts’ while we explored lots of different techniques, such as pinching, pulling, twisting, burrowing, bending and pushing.

Week beginning 1st May

This week saw Henrietta deliver the story of the Train Ride by June Crebbin. We have been retelling the story in the small world tray, acting out our own train rides in the role play area and in Art we have been printing with different shapes to create pictures of trains. We made mini train tracks in the finger gym and used the bee-bots as trains to send on a journey to the beach.

  In our Understanding of the World lesson, we continued to explore forces, by using marbles, sand and water with the guttering, wheels, pipes and tubes. We compared the different resources and how the marbles, sand and water moved through and down them.

Reception Class were very excited to find that Henrietta the hedgehog had finally come out of hibernation and delivered two books linked to our new topic of ‘Ticket to Ride’. The fiction book she delivered was Mr Gumpy’s motor car by John Burningham and a non-fiction all about different types of vehicles. In our continuous provision this week we have been painting pictures of Mr Gumpy’s motor car, retelling the story in the small world tray, in the finger gym we have been putting nuts and bolts together and carefully decorating a car picture using tiny buttons and beads. We have also been looking at photographs of cars from the past and we were amazed at how cars have changed over the years.

In Maths we have been thinking about time and developing an understanding of what 1 minute and 5 minutes feel like. We read ‘5 minutes peace’ by Jill Murphy and then went and ran around the playground for 5 minutes. We then came back into class to see what we could do in 1 minute. We had to see how many times we could write our name, write our new tricky word – said, how many beads we could thread onto a lace and how many cubes tall our tower could be. We also worked in groups to see how far we could count in 1 minute. 

In Science we started our new topic on forces and investigated different surfaces to see which was the best for the toy car.

After our lesson we enjoyed continuing to investigate with our friends.

On Thursday we went to Blessed Edward Oldcorne to attend a multi skills festival. We had great fun learning and practising lots of new skills and meeting new friends.

In our expressive arts and design lesson we started to explore ‘printing’. We started by exploring printing with our hands in dry and damp sand and then we went on to printing with different parts of our hands. We were amazed at the different shapes we created! Finally, we used a range of soft and hard junk modelling pieces to find out the different prints they created. Next week we are going to use our new skills and techniques to create our own pictures.