We had fantastic day in the forest in the sunshine today.  Many of us had said we wanted to make food for the animals.  Today we did that!

We used natural materials that we could leave in the forest to make a delicious bird feeder.  We had to poke lots and lots of seeds into an apple, attach 2 sticks for a perch and tie it onto a tree.  We all tried hard to not give up even though it was a tricky task.  We can’t wait to see if the birds enjoy our bird feeders.

We also had some more free-play in ‘Jurassic World’.  We climbed trees, threw moss, continued building our mud bridge, built dens and had fun running with our friends.  It was a great day!

Please ensure you have seen the important note about the changes to the forest times for next week.  This note should be below this post.  Thank you.

The children are desperate to have their lunch in the forest.  We will now be doing this on Wednesday 18th May.  Our forest session on this day will be 11.15am until 2.30pm.  Parent helpers for this session are:  Veer, Axel, Oliver, Neve, Abbey, Holly and Timo.  Please let me know at pick up if you are unable to help with these new times.

On Wednesday 18th May the children (and parent helpers)  should bring:

• a packed lunch and a snack
  • 2 bottles of water
• suncream and a sun hat
• The usual items required for all forest sessions e.g. waterproof trousers, extra fleece or jumper, sturdy shoes etc

Thank you.

We explored fact families in greater detail today using play contexts in the sand, with dominoes, paint, threading beads and playdough.  We also used number lines to work out the answers to some bigger sums.  Some of us also developed our skills in problem solving by follow the instructions of some complex construction models.

Photos to follow…

Today we had a chance to see what it would be like to be a spider. We made our own spider webs which were very, very tricky to make! Our only target was to not give up when it got tricky. This is something important we are trying to achieve at the moment.  You could encourage this at home too by encouraging your child to not give up at swimming, homework, riding bikes etc.  🙂

Photos to follow….

We had a fantastic day in the forest today.  Following on from our 3D thinking map last week we went on minibeast hunts today.  We were trying to find out which minibeasts were the most common in the forest so that we could find out which food we should be providing.  We made 3D picture graphs to keep a record of the minibeasts we found.  We discovered that slugs and millipedes were the most common minibeasts in the forest.

We also had some free-play exploring ‘Jurassic World.’  This is a great area for building our skills in climbing, balancing and building.  Many of us decided to make a bridge across a very muddy section and worked in teams to gather up large sticks to make the bridge.  Some of us also balanced on logs and climbed on fallen trees.  Many of us enjoyed exploring the watery areas of the forest and had fun throwing in large sticks.  As you may have guessed from our very messy clothes, our favourite free-play activity was squelching, jumping and playing in the very sticky mud!

Enzo even lost his shoes!

We all enjoyed our short visit to the forest this week.  The main purpose of the visit was to decide if the forest was a safe and happy place to visit.  We worked with a partner to complete a ‘Forest Safety Checklist.’  We decided that the forest was a great place to visit because it had mud, trees to climb, animals and good places for hiding.  Many of us felt it needed tidied up so we may arrange this for one of our forest sessions.  We decided to make posters asking forest users to please take their litter and doggy business home!

We  had time to explore the forest with our friends.  We discovered ‘Jurassic World!’ and good places for hiding and climbing.

We also explored a ‘talking tub’ with Mrs Duncan so that she could see which areas of the forest we were most interested in learning about.  We explored different forest artefacts and demonstrated a strong interest in forest animals – we will focus on this during the first few forest sessions.

Please ensure you have returned your forest helper slips.

This week we created fantastic pieces of writing – our own delicious food menus!

We looked at menus from our favourite restaurants and decided which ones were colourful and which ones were dull.  This helped us to create our own targets for our own menus.  We thought the menus with WOW words were also much better.  We then created our own menus for our restaurants using our targets.  Mrs Duncan wishes they were real – the food offered sounds delicious.  We had ‘Enzo’s Borsalino’, ‘Aila’s Burger restaurant,’  ‘Scott’s sausage restaurant,’  ‘Axel81,’ ‘Kian’s Jelly Cafe’ and much, much more.  We hope to have these on display at parents’ night.

Here we are choosing the star writers for our menus.

Last week we created a 3D thinking map with Mrs Duncan to help us decide what interests us about forest animals.  We all had an opportunity to share our ideas and came up with some fantastic ideas for forest activities and areas of learning.   Minibeast hunts, animal food and building animal homes proved to be the most popular areas of interest.  We also decided which resources we would need to achieve each of these activities.  Mrs Duncan was delighted that we were being responsible for our own learning!

This week we have shown a strong interest in putting on shows for Mrs Duncan.  We decided to use the puppet theatre as one of our play activities to help us explore this further.  We chose to make sign-up lists for people who want to watch our shows and are VERY strict if they do not attend! 🙂

We also showed an interest in moving cars and minibeasts along an empty wall space.  We independently put up a large roll of paper so that we could draw roads and tracks on this wall space.  Mrs Duncan was delighted that this made so many boys very enthusiastic about drawing and writing –  well done boys!

Many of us have also been showing an interest in using measuring tools and we are becoming increasingly confident in using measuring words in our play.

Apologies for the lack of updates this week on the Blog.  I am having some techincal difficulties but hope to have these resolved soon.  Thanks for your patience – the photographs will be worth the wait! 🙂