Innovating ‘The Enormous Turnip’!

We are getting very good at innovating stories now and using our talk for writing skills and signifiers to retell stories and expand our story-telling language!

The last few weeks we have been learning the story of ‘The Enormous Turnip’ and loved performing the story using our signifiers and props! Today we decided to change the story slightly and make up our own version! We changed the turnip into ‘The Enormous Pumpkin’ and changed the characters that helped to pull and pull! The children loved retelling our innovated story and thought of some more actions to represent our fox, goat and deer! We cant wait to use these actions to help us write our story tomorrow…

World Bee Day!

This morning in assembly, Mrs Buss talked to the whole school about ‘World Bee Day’ and the importance of Bee’s to the worlds ecosystem and how they help to pollinate our trees, flowers and even food! We need bee’s to help grow the vegetables and food we eat and they play a vital role in the worlds food chains!

Unfortunately most of the species of bees in this country are in decline and have now become labelled as endangered. We spoke about what we could do to help bees (not hurt them, offer sugary food for rest, create wildflower patches, build bee houses) and chatted about being kind to all living things.

The children in Foundation Stage have been busily creating a ‘wildflower space’ since last Summer and today we spotted lots of signs of bee activity there! This was lovely to see and the children enjoyed just sitting and watching the bees busily go about their day helping the plants!

We noticed, like Mrs Buss said, that the bees particularly took a liking to our blue and purple wildflowers as that’s their favourite colour! We can’t wait to build some bee houses over the next few weeks in Forest School and Nature Club… watch this space!

 

Buddhist Visit…

Foundation Stage had a special visitor this week…Neil from the local Buddhist Centre… 

Our visit was very interesting and we had some fabulous questions to ask Neil!

We have being learning all about the religion and practice of Buddhism and what they believe and how they celebrate this. Neil brought lots of things in for us to look at… we particularly liked the singing bowl, which helped to start and finish our meditation…this we found very relaxing!

“Who was Buddha?” “What did he teach?” “Why is Buddha called Buddha?”

 

Fabulous Writing!

We are super impressed with the writing in F2 over the past few weeks!

We have been learning the story of ‘The Enormous Turnip‘ and can now retell the story confidently using signifiers! This has helped us in our writing and inspired us to write about the story and the key events!

We have been working hard at checking our writing and making sure we are using capital letters, fingers spaces and full stops!

F2 Stay and Play!

Bridge Building!

Yesterday afternoon F2 had a wonderful ‘stay and play’ session themed around building bridges!

To finish our story of ‘The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff’ we decided it would be nice to invite our families in to help us make our very own bridge for the Billy Goats to cross! We made and designed some fantastic models and showed great team-work, determination, perseverance and hard work!

Thank you to everyone who came in for our session, we hope you enjoyed it as much as us!

Library afternoon!

F2 had a lovely afternoon listening to stories and looking at books in our beautiful library!

We love our sessions in the library and are getting very good at taking care of books and using our library voices!

There are lots of interesting non-fiction and fiction books and the children especially liked ‘The little people big dreams’ collection!

Kandinsky!

This term we have a new artist inspiration Wassily Kandinsky! We have learnt all about who Wassily was (he was a teacher at first!) and how he loved to listen to music whilst he got creative! His wonderful intrinsic circles inspired us to do some colour mixing, learning how to make up our own paints! And we loved creating colourful circles and especially enjoyed doing this to music! Lots of us said that we would like to go to art school as we loved painting and making colours! We chatted a lot about the colours we were using and how these colours made us feel! Sometimes colours can make you feel happy or sad or represent different things… like love or nature! Our paintings are so fabulous we have made our very own Kandinsky display!

 

Innovating the story!

Over the last few weeks F2 have been learning the story of ‘The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff!’ We have loved acting out the story and performing it to each other using our talk for writing signifiers! We are now very familiar with how traditional tales start and end and some of the vocabulary used! We have created some amazing story maps, wanted posters and sentence strips! We also had a visit from the troll himself and did some fabulous hot seating, asking lots of interesting questions!

This week (because we know the story so well!) we decided to mix it up a bit and change some parts of the story! Mrs Buss used our tales toolkit basket to help us and we had so much fun playing with different characters and different problems! In the end we decided to change the three goats to pigs and change the problem of a troll to a… dragon! The children loved performing the story again, using the same vocabulary but with different characters! We have created some amazing writing from this and it has inspired us in our play to make up our own versions!!!

Beep Beep Day!

F2 have joined in with ‘Beep Beep Day’ today and have been learning to cross the road safely! We read all about ‘Super Cat’ and his four road rules to follow… STOP, LOOK, LISTEN,THINK! The children impressed us all with their knowledge already of road safety and the best and safest places to cross with an adult. We spoke about Zebra crossings and how to cross carefully and safely! The children loved getting out and about and learning this skill practically! We also got a lot of waves off car drivers and a few beeps and smiles!

 

This week in F2…

This week in F2, we have started our story, The 3 Billy Goats Gruff.

First, we read the book together, lots of us were familiar with it and loved joining in, especially with the “who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge?”

Next, we had great fun acting out the story…Mrs. Buss was the troll, she was very scary!

Finally, we read the story again, this time using signifiers to help to retell the story.

In literacy we have been sequencing the story, drawing a map of the story and adding dictated sentences (this is when we make up a sentence together, using the correct structure, including capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.)

 In maths, we have been learning our teen numbers.  We know that a teen number always has one set of ten, so we can put that in our head and count on.

In PE we took part in team games, taking turns and cheering our team members on.

In RE we found out that Buddhism is one of the largest religions of the world, it is based what Buddha taught people and they live by 5 important rules. Not lying or stealing are two of them, we discussed why these are important to our lives too.

We also learnt about the famous artist Wassily Kandinsky. He was born in Russia in 1866 and many people believe he was the first abstract painter.  He didn’t paint objects and instead painted colours and shapes, often listening to music so he could try to paint what he heard and felt … next week we will be embracing our creativity and painting in the style of Kandinsky.

As always, we have spent lots of time learning and discovering outdoors…weeding and watering our tomato plants that have started to grow, checking our bug hotel for creatures, making troll bridges and a feast for the goats in the mud kitchen.