This has been a quick term! We have been thinking about ‘What lives in my garden?’ We have been looking at plants and animals that may or may not live in our gardens.

We have looked at lots of Eric Carle books and discovered through our creative activities that he illustrates his books using mixed media using tissue paper collage and paint. We had a go at creating our own with fantastic results!

Eric Carle also wrote a book called The Tiny Seed which explains the journey and lifecycle of a Sunflower. This was one of our Drawing Club books. So, we planted seeds and have been ensuring that we supply all the things to make them grow. We did some fabulous pastel pictures of Sunflowers and used playdough to make Sunflower sculptures. 

In maths, we have been looking at the composition of numbers and using many different manipulatives to see how many different ways we can make the numbers to aid our understanding that a teen number is one lot of ten and then some ones or units. We have also been looking at different ways we can add and takeaway using number lines, number tracks and a range of manipulatives.

In computing we have looked at the use of technology at home and school and how this has changed over the last 30 years, looking at a range of different items such as telephones and cassette recorders, mobile phones and cameras that were used when Mrs Blench was a child (she must be really old)and comparing them with technology we use now.

We then returned back up to date and explored the use of ipads and how we can take photographs with them looking at how we can change the orientation of the camera zoom in and out and how to take a photo that is focussed and what that means.

We have continued to enjoy exploring and creating in our Forest School area andh have made minibeasts using natural materials as well as mud pies and other delicacies in our mud kitchen. We even started to dig for treasure one day, although we didn’t find any.

We created a role play based on a Garden Centre with vets and pet supplies which has helped us with the concept of money. It has been a huge success!

As part of enterprise week, the children and parent volunteers have been working hard to create a whole range of ‘Bug Bakes’ decorating cupcakes and rolls and biscuits into a range of bugs and animals to sell at our Enterprise Sale.

To extend our enterprise skills, we have been exploring how people earn money and what they spend it on. We have also learnt to identify the difference between buying things we need and buying things we want. The children have also gained an understanding of the fact that not everyone has the same amount of money and not everyone has the same wants and needs.