Saturday 23 May 2015

Minibeast party

The children decided that we should have a class party and that we did!
They went about making paper chains, posters, piñata and cakes! We even played Minibeast musical bumps outside!






Making mini beast headbands after listening to 'The very ugly bug' story.


Here we are having fun with the piñata. The children decided we needed sweets to fill the insides(nice try!) but we didn't have enough. They then found some sparkly treasures.It was hard to break though!










The piñata was very difficult to break but the last person managed to knock it off.....Mrs Hough!!!

What a lovely way to spend our last afternoon before a very we'll deserved break. 

Thank you to you clever party planners. I can't wait for the end of term celebrations....well, actually I can. I want to enjoy every day we have left... Your children are amazing.

Happy holidays everyone.













Pond dipping


This week we paid our first visit to the pond area. We wanted to find out what mini beasts are living there. We were surprised with what we found and it was amazing to hear the children as they identified the different mini beasts found.
Tadpoles...

What have you caught??
Oh no, we lost it!!






We found water snails, tadpoles, pond skaters, water boatmen and even dragonfly nymphs.

We even saw a grass snake!! 




Beautiful butterflies



We have really enjoyed watching the last stage of our caterpillar life cycle. We then released them into the world to be free! We were lucky that they were not in a hurry to go far away and some of us even managed to hold one. How magical.







And here we are being beautiful butterflies!!















Monday 18 May 2015

Snails



 
We have been busy exploring patterns on snail shells and got to work at making our own spiral patterns using a variety of resources. Here we are using beads to create spirals.




We used salt dough to create spiral shapes and made our own snails. We will cook them and paint them when they have gone hard.

We used paper strips to wind around our fingers to create curly spiral snail shapes.


We used different materials to create and explore spiral patterns.

We loved using the empty sauce bottles to squirt water spiral shapes.
We used pastels to draw snail pictures and we labelled the different parts of a snails body. 

We explored the patterns on top of our stepping stones and found one had a spiral pattern. We used crayons yo create rubbings of these different patterns.
We looked at the picture of 'The Snail' by Henry Matisse and we then used paper to re-create our own versions. 


We have loved watching the snails and we have built them our own snail trails for them to travel over, under, through, etc.
 Poppy brought in a dead butterfly for show and tell and we were fascinated by it. 



And then we made apple crumble!! 
Child - led planning means we follow the child interests and so can be found doing all kinds of wonderful things that have no relationship to what we might be thinking about in class but that the children really want to do.


Mmmmm..... We loved sharing the crumble at the end of the day. Delicious!,





Today our first butterfly emerged. How exciting. We can't wait to see what we might find tomorrow!


And our tadpoles now have legs! It's so exciting in Class R!!!