Term 5

Growing

From bean to beanstalk... then mini beasts and creepy crawlies!

Mysterious beanstalks have appeared in our classrooms, and messages keep appearing in the mornings. Magic hens appear then disappear into the clouds. Story telling, magic and science merge in our interesting continuation of the Growing learning journey.

We plant beans and seeds and learn how to help them grow. Discussions around plant growing are taking a scientific turn, while our imaginations grow through story telling around Jack and The Beanstalk.

We are exploring different versions of the story, communicate with the giant in the clouds and negotiate our turn at the hen that lays golden eggs...

Next, we will examine caterpillar life cycle, and hope to release our own butterflies in the garden created when we planted our seeds.

Term 3

Winter and Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs:

After the extraordinary event of discovering dinosaur footprints in our classrooms, a couple of dinosaur nests and finally, two enormous eggs, we decided to investigate this situation more closely.

We are now talking about the wonderful world of Dinosaurs, and trying to make sense of a time which is incredibly exciting, but almost beyond imagining on a time line.

We have a range of Dinosaur stories, but we are mostly using and and learning about non-fiction books, and how these can be used to learn about new things.

Snow finally arrived, so we built a snowman!

Nature's outdoors classroom was very generous this week. Playing in the snow, we discovered that building snowmen and playing in snow makes us warmer than we thought. However, making snow angels can make us very wet, even though the snow felt dry and fluffy at the time!

Dino Girl and her giant friends from the Travelling Natural History Museum

Winter

Although we didn't have much snow, our Winter topic was a huge opportunity for learning and fun!

We explored ice - even though from the freezer- and talked about all the seasonal changes. We saw some amazing frost crystals, and investigated ice under the digital microscope.

The children used some amazing language to describe their thoughts about winter. They created winter tree drawings, and discussed snowmen - in the great hope they might get to make some!

As a culmination of our learning, we wrote winter class poems, did winter themed weaving and lots more writing.

Key texts this term: Poems

Cold from Shirley Hughes: "Out and About"

Winter Trees from Nicola Davies: "A First Book of Nature"