This year our school’s theme was: Wild About Reading! Just take a look at all the wild animals that arrived into school today.  The children shared their information fact-file about their chosen animal and their ‘caught in the wild’ photographs.  What a lot of  wild and wacky places to be caught reading.

Our special visitor was from our local library and she shared a story about jungle animals and answered the children’s questions about her job.  

Keep on reading!

The children helped to raise money for the charity by wearing something red, buying raffle ticket for an amazing chocolate hamper and some delicious cakes. We went to a special assembly and learnt about the reasons why it’s important to raise money for charity. Now we wait in anticipation to find out who won the hamper!

Shrove Tuesday is a great day for  pancake lovers as well as being of religious significance for Christians.  The children shared past family experiences and are wondering whether Dr Kirby can really give up chocolate for 40 days!

We read and followed the instructions to make the pancake batter in class and sang the cBeebies pancake rap whilst whisking it smooth.  The fun continued in role play even after we had decorated and eaten our pancakes up!   

The children had a fantastic time celebrating Chinese New Year and were wowed by the acrobatic Chinese dragon and lion dance videos.  We danced a much easier version practicing our coordination with a drum beat and made our own version of a Bolang Gu rattle drum.  The children also made red envelopes but instead of money ours contained a lucky chocolate heart.  Our favourite activity was tasting a variety of Chinese food!

After watching some traditional Chinese dances being performed our visitors demonstrated some Tai Chi moves.   It was much harder than it looks to cultivate our life energy to flow smoothly throughout our body.

A wonderful opportunity to explore, develop own ideas, question and answer. 

Who lives in this cave?  The children have been describing characters from The Gruffalo’s Child and exploring her cave.  They followed different footprints to find out which animal left them and made their favourite animal character from this story.  Can you guess which character they created?

Is the big bad mouse heavier than the Gruffalo’s child?  The children used a bucket balance ‘seesaw’ to compare the weights of the different characters.  They were so good at this that they were challenged to predict the results by pretending to be the balance before checking. 

Wow!  We are fabulous at using positional language; on, in, beside, next to, in front of, behind, above, below, under and beneath.  Can you describe the position of the penguins?

Reception had fun this afternoon after discussing what would happen to The Snowman if we wrapped him up in a hat, coat and gloves. We found out how to use a data logger to measure the temperature of cold and hot water and then investigated what happened if the container was wrapped up in a “coat”. We were very surprised to find that the containers wearing a coat didn’t get hotter. Instead, it was the cold water that didn’t have a coat that got warmer while the hot water without a coat got colder! 

We all enjoyed Santa visiting Early years today, even the grown ups! We asked him lots of questions and sang him some songs. Hopefully we will see him again soon.