What a week! We have had such a lovely week exploring outside and enjoying the summer sunshine. The children have been busy making mud pies, problem solving in the water area and exploring a range of learning around the story ‘Lucy and Tom at the Seaside’. We have been learning doubles in maths and the children have blown us away with their quick understanding of these numbers.

This week the children have been exploring under the sea and creating some beautiful writing to send to Polly the pirate! They explored different sea life that live in the ocean and the children created an underwater scene to inspire their independent writing.

The children had a wonderful Forest School experience yesterday and completed a range of activities such as making spinners, hammering leaves to make pictures and leaf pressing. We also had lots of fun playing games including tug of war and relaxing in the tree hammock!

Year R had a special delivery this week which sparked lots of excitement! We came to school on Monday to find a message in a bottle from Polly the Pirate! This has kickstarted our ‘Life on the Beach’ topic – the children have immersed themselves in a range of beach and ocean themed activities this week ready to write back to Polly. To mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day the Year R children watched a snippet of the live broadcast of the event held on Southsea Common. They loved watching the Red Arrows!

What a busy week it has been in Starfish and Seahorse class! We started the week off with beautiful weather and lots of reading, writing and exploring outside and have ended the week on 2 exciting but wet forest school sessions!! This week has definitely been lots of fun and the children have really enjoyed it. After the success of our lovely chicks, the children were keen to learn about a life cycle of something new… We had a special delivery of caterpillars and the children have loved watching them grow! We did some research on the ‘butterfly life cycle’ and the children have enjoyed making their own versions! Now we are just waiting for our caterpillars to transform.

This week our focus in Reception has been around the story ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. The children have been sequencing pictures, writing captions and making beanstalks out of a range of art and crafts. The children have also been practising skills learnt from Forest School last term to complete some fantastic outdoor learning. These included leaf printing, making nature bracelets, making dens, exploring different herbs and their scents, and planting their very own sunflowers!

This week the children had a very special delivery… 11 eggs were delivered to our classroom in an incubator and we have had the very important job of looking after them. The children checked the eggs each day to look out for signs of them hatching. Soon enough, we started to see cracks in the eggs and eventually we had 11 chicks! The children have been so excited and have loved observing, holding and looking after our special visitors. They have inspired lots of art work and writing which will lead into our fact writing next week and exploration of a chickens life cycle… right in time for Easter!

The children had a fantastic day at Forest School this week. They used their teamwork skills to complete a range of fun activities. These included making a fire and toasting marshmellows, cutting wood, making wood necklaces, going on a scavenger hut and lots more!

This week the children were very excited to see our ‘eggs’ hatch into Dinosaurs. We then read stories about Dinosaurs including the book ‘Giganotosaurus’. The children have shown enthusiasm and excitement learning about Dinosaurs and have completed lots of child led learning based around this topic. In maths this week we continued our topic on Height. The children have become confident using vocabulary such as ‘Taller and Shorter’. We have also been practising our phase 3 digraphs and have completed a range of different phonic activities.

This week the children’s literacy focus was a story called ‘If I Built a Car’. The children then designed and created their own vehicle’s using a range of resources including junk modelling, play dough, construction and paint! They then completed some fantastic writing describing what they have made.