Term 5

This has been such a special term! We have been looking at ‘What lives in my garden’ we started by having a good look around our own school garden and outdoor area. Armed with magnifying glasses and a data sheet we embarked on a minibeast hunt and found many different creatures. This helped stimulate our creativity as we set about creating minibeasts in a variety of different ways including creating them using pebbles.

We have used many Eric Carle books in our Literacy lessons and discovered through our creative activities that he illustrates his books using mixed media and collage.

Eric Carle also wrote a book called The Tiny Seed which explains the journey and lifecycle of a Sunflower. So we planted seeds and have been ensuring that we supply all the things to make them grow. We did some fabulous water colour paintings of Sunflowers and used playdough to make Sunflower sculptures.  Finally we sold some of our seedlings to raise funds of next terms school trip and even had some left to plant in our own garden.

As part of our ‘The World’ focus we have been lucky enough to observe close up the life cycle of the butterfly starting with the eggs, caterpillars, watching them spin their cocoons and then waiting for them to emerge as butterflies. Not only that, we have had the opportunity to watch frog spawn transform into tadpoles and are constantly monitoring the changes they go through until they transform into froglets.

Then one of our parents came in with some week old ducklings for us to meet so we could talk about their lifecycles too!

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 units. We have also been looking at different ways we can add and takeaway using number lines number tracks and a range of manipulatives.

As part of enterprise week the children have been working hard to create bug hotels out of recycled materials and planting seeds and looking after plants to sell at our Enterprise Sale. To extend out enterprise skills we have been exploring money, 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.