Spring Term 2
Maths in action! We have been practising our careful counting, matching amount of items to the corresponding numeral, measuring with cubes, putting objects in size order, making double numbers, partitioning into two groups, adding and subtracting!
This week we enjoyed reading the story 'Hop Little Bunnies' . We had the most wonderful surprise to finish our term off. Miss Mansfield received a message form the Easter Bunny to say that he had been to visit our school while the children had been busy learning. He said that he was so impressed with them all that he had hidden some treats for them to find outside. This gave us lots of opportunities to take about positional language....above, under, next to, on top of, behind, in between, over, beside. We also created some wonderful collage Easter cards for our families out of different materials. What a super way to end a wonderful term of learning!
This week we have been learning about New Life, animals and their babies and Easter. We talked about the baby animals that we have started to see being born in the Spring time. We have been learning which baby animals belong to which adult animals and what their names are. We also made baby animals in the creative area with junk materials and thought about how we can fix the boxes together and what shapes we could use for the bodies and the legs. We also made playdough chicks and selected materials that we could use for wings, legs, beaks and eyes. We also looked carefully at what had happened to our egg that we had placed in the vinegar. It had completely changed! It no longer had a hard shell. In fact it was a completely different texture. It was like a bouncy ball now with no shell at all. We could also see through the rubbery skin into the yellow yolk. We were very careful when we touched it as it was very delicate and we didn't want to break it!
This week we have been reading ' The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle and learning about the life cycle of different animals including butterflies, chickens and frogs! We have reordered the story, retold the story, we create the stages of the life cycle of the butterfly using our friends and even wrapped up someone in toilet paper to represent the chrysalis! We have made our own collage life cycles of butterflies, made caterpillar patterns, ordered different caterpillars from the shortest to the longest, made story maps as well threading pipe cleaners to make caterpillars.
As part of our learning about plants we read the book 'A seed in need' and talked about each of the things plants need to help them grown big and healthy. We then planted some seeds of our own. We planted radishes, broad beans, cress and spring onions. We gave them a warm bed of soil to sleep in and watered them to keep them 'hydrated'!
This week we have been thinking about plants and how they grow. We read the story 'The tiny seed' by Eric Carle and learnt about the plant life cycle and how to care for plants. We decided to use the artwork in the book as inspiration for our Mother's Day cards and looked at how Eric Carle created his own collage paper using paint and different brush strokes and printing techniques to create his textured papers. We used our papers to the recreate the front cover of the the book in our designs for our cards!
This week we discovered something in our sand tray... we became palaeontologists and used different tools to uncover the fossils, bones, teeth and eggs! What sort of eggs could they be? How could we look after them? The children designed and created nests for the eggs to keep them warn and safe over night. After reading 'Tyrannosaurus drip' the children made predictions about what sort of animals might be inside their eggs. We used tools to help the animals hatch from their eggs only to discover baby dinosaurs!
This week we have been thinking about new life in Springtime. We have been reading the story 'The Odd Egg' which has led to lots of learning around eggs and the animals that ley eggs and animals that give birth to live babies. As part of our learning, we conducted an egg experiment using a chickens egg and white vinegar. We made lots of observations about the egg and then predictions about what we thought would happen to the egg after a couple of days in the vinegar. We observed the changes over time but did not expect the outcome that we found!
What a start to Spring 2 we have had! Spring flower paintings, looking at seasonal colour and changes to the environment. We have been exploring the outdoors and enjoyed playing in our outdoor area with our pre-school friends whilst looking of signs of Spring.
