Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes

 

Over the last few weeks during group time we have been focusing on the following stories Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hickory Dickory Dock, The Three Billy Goats Gruff and Mr Wolf’s Pancakes; reading, discussing and completing activities relating to them.

 For Cinderella we read a few varieties of the story discussing what was similar and different. We looked at our shoes describing them e.g. size, colour, Velcro, laces etc. We took turns to talk and listen. We assessed our self-help skills by taking off and putting on our shoes (we all managed this). We talked about the chores we helped our family with.
Mr Wolf’s Pancakes, we read the story, discussed all the familar characters we met in the story. We had to predict what would happen at the end of the story. We made our own frying pans and pancakes to toss. We sang songs and rhymes from the story. We played the game What’s the time Mr wolf?
Hickory Dickory Dock; we said the rhyme adding our own rhyming verses. We made clocks, discussing time, clock face, hands, numbers, etc. We talked about our daily routine and worked with a learning partner to put our day in order. We talked about when we would use clocks, timers, watches, calendars etc.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff; We read the story through talking about the pictures. We then re-told the story using puppets and repeating the refains from the story. “Who’s that trip trapping over my bridge?” We discussed sizes small, medium and big. We measured ourselves to see who was the tallest and smallest in our groups. We also used the measure worms to arrange by size.
Little Red Riding Hood; We read the story, discussing what was happening. We re-told the story using puppets. We read different versions of the same story, discussing the differences and similarities. We identified our own name and found the initial letter of our names. We played the game what’s the time Mr Wolf.

The Gingerbread Man

We have been reading different version of the Gingerbread Man stories and talked about the characters in the books. We learned the rhyme that was in all the books “Run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man.” We acted out the story during our group time, wearing headbands with pictures of the characters. We chased the Gingerbread Man, while repeating the rhyme. We all joined in and enjoyed taking part. We drew and decorated pictures of the Gingerbread Man with crayons and buttons.  We have been reading other stories that the Gingerbread man pops up in. We also had Gingerbread man biscuits for snack. They were yummy!!

 We made our own books to share at home with our families. We had to sequence the story in the correct order.

  

We made a wall display, painting and printing the characters. We mixed flour into the paint to make it thicker to look more like biscuits for the wall display. We talked about what we could remember about the story to add to the display.

We are developing and extending our remembering, understanding and applying skills through the stories.

We are developing and extending our fine and gross motor skills and hand eye coordination through the art work we created.

We are learning the importance of working together and co-operating with other.

Planning and Building a Model

We have been extending our knowledge and understanding of planning and building models at the Art Area. We started by either drawing a plan of our model or gathering all the resources we would like to use to build a model.
 
We discussed all the different parts to our model. Next we had to decide which resources would be best to use for our planned model.  We could choose items such as boxes, cardboard tubes, yogurt pots, buttons, lolli-sticks, small sticks, pom-poms, coloured shapes, googly eyes, paper etc.

Once we gathered all the resources we thought we would need we looked at our plans to decide where to start building our model. We could add to the resources and adapt our plans as needed.

We had to compare our models and plans throughout the process to make sure they looked the same.

Lucie's model-dinosaur 

Model building is good for hand eye coordination, fine motor skills – using skills like cutting with scissors, gluing and painting – and of course for developing the imagination. Their creations have the potential to become anything they wish!

The skills the children are developing and extending are:

Communication Language and Literacy
Their vocabulary is extended with new experiences, language development can be facilitated through interaction, planning process and communication and literacy will be encouraged through making marks and develop handwriting skills.

Personal Social and Emotional Development
by the opportunities to develop creativity without pressure of making an end product. This increases children’s well-being and self-esteem.

Creative Development
by providing opportunities to explore a range of media and materials.

Problem Solving, Numeracy and Reasoning
by providing opportunities for children to explore space and shape.  They can explore patterns, compare and measure. They can decide what materials work best together, how best to stick materials e.g. glue, glue sticks, sellotape etc.

Knowledge and Understanding of the World
by opportunities to explore and investigate such as showing curiosity in the materials.

Physical Development
by encouraging the children to become aware of movement and space. This activity encourages both gross and fine motor skills as well hand-eye co-ordination