Settling Swans

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Wow! Our newest Swans have settled in amazingly. We have been very busy getting to know each other and starting our topic of Marvellous Me. In language for thinking, the children have been discussing who is in their families and people who are special to them.
We have also focused on the great story ‘The Colour Monster’ for our Talk for Writing. The children learnt lots about emotions and ways in which they can deal with them. The children expanded their emotional vocabulary by learning alternative words for sad, happy, angry etc.
The children have been so good at completing all the activities with their new friends during discovery time and have already become happy members of Swans class.

Art Week – Andy Goldsworthy

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This week the Swans have immersed themselves in the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy. They have created their own interpretations of his art works using similar natural materials to Goldsworthy.
During discovery time the child also used lots of natural materials they collected from the forest school and field to use to create shapes and numbers. The Swans are looking forward to their parents visiting their art exhibition to see all their hard work.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

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As part of our ‘Once Upon A Time’ topic, this week Swans have been focusing on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. They created their own version with actions! They have then been using this during their Language for Thinking sessions to build on adjectives for character description, role play and extending their vocabulary by thinking of alternatives for the words in their story.
They have been busy in Discovery Time too! They have used the iPads to draw different parts of the story. They have also used the compare bears to make repeated patterns and created their own repeated patterns. Independently, they have sequenced and written the story and have given some of the characters speech.
We have had such a busy week! We have earnt our rest ready for Cinderella next week.

Once Upon A Time

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Jack and the Beanstalk
This week we have started our new topic of Once upon a time… Choosing Jack and the beanstalk as our focus story. At the start of the week, together with Miss Coghlan, all the children created a short story of Jack and the Beanstalk and added their own actions to help them remember. They were incredible at helping Miss Coghlan remember the story and actions all week. During the language for thinking sessions the children explored different vocabulary to use for describing the characters from the story and were able to sequence the story using pictures with simple sentences to summarise.
Discovery time
During independent time the children got creative using Jack and the Beanstalk as their focus. They made playdoh beanstalks, created pictures using and leaves, role played with stick puppets, labelled characters from the story, used cubes to measure and compare different sized beanstalks and recreated the story using stickle bricks.
Empathy Day
To introduce this concept Miss Coghlan went through some of this amazing book about empathy. After discussing what empathy was and how we can show it, the children went through some scenarios. They were asked to discuss how those children might be feeling, have they ever felt like this and what could you do to help.
‘I’ve felt proud like that boy when I got a certificate from dancing’ Beaux
‘I’ve felt upset like that girl when I hurt my leg too’ Evin
‘I could help the worried boy if they want to chat’ Poppy
‘I could tell the sad girl that things will get better’ Ollie S
‘I could ask the lonely girl to come and play’ Lennox
Maths
The Swans have been learning all about odd numbers at the start of the week. They are now successfully able to identify odd and even numbers from looking at the amounts and the numerals. They worked super hard during their maths lesson with their partners on this. Then, at the end of the week, they learnt all about positional language and… wow! They were amazing at this! With their partners they played a barrier game of building something using 3 or 4 pieces, described what pieces went where for them to have the same, but there was no peeking allowed. Their language and description of position was fantastic.

Transport

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The Swans started their week with Muddy Monday, where they created fantastic pieces of art using mud to paint. The created lots of different patterns and pictures with their partners.
During the rest of the week the Swans continued to learn about their topic: Transport. During continuous provision time, they sorted transport  that flies in the sky, goes on water, drives on the road, or around a track. They showed amazing creativity and teamwork when building their own tracks and garages to park their vehicles.
They built on their great fine motor skills using the scissors to cut out parts to design their own types of transport.
Swans also demonstrated their growing sentence writing using their phonics and tricky word knowledge to write about transport.
They were even very lucky to have some of the Year 6 children come and read them stories at the end of the week. It has been a fabulous week. Well done, Swans!

Transport

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We started our first week back with a check-in to see what the children did during their holidays and to discuss how they were feeling about things. The children were able to tell our emotion monsters one thing that made them happy in the holidays:
‘I went to the park and had an ice cream’ Evin
‘I went on a plane’ Tyler. W
‘I got to have a sleep over at nanny’s’ Beaux
They also did a great job sharing one thing they didn’t like about the holidays:
‘I didn’t like it when I fell over’ Poppy
‘I didn’t like that I didn’t see my friends’ Ollie. S
‘I didn’t like it when it rained because we had to stay at home’ Kadi
For this next half term Swans will be learning about transport. We started the week by reading the amazing book Naughty Bus by Jan and Jerry Oke. The children loved the story so much that we continued to do lots of different task to build on the story within our language for thinking time. Elsewhere in the classroom and outdoors, the children demonstrated their learning from our maths session about ‘first, then and now’ by building their own addition stories using a bus. They used their fantastic writing skills to label buses and creativity to create their own buses using the blue bricks outside.

What a wonderful world! Looking at Plants

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As part of our topic ‘What a wonderful world!’ during our Language for thinking time this week we have been focusing and learning about plants. The children started their week by learning what a plant needs to grow, moving on to what the parts of the plant are and what their job is. Finally, by the end of the week the children were able to order the life cycle of a plant.
In our continuous provision time, the children took full advantage of the sunshine and did some amazing planting and exploring of plants in our reception outdoor area.
The children enjoyed drawing and labelling flowers independently.
They explored real plants and flowers in the tuff tray with magnify glasses, matching the phase 3 sentences to the correct plant pictures.
The children have also painted fantastic pictures of real-life flowers. Fantastic job Swans!

Infinity and Beyond

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This week the Swans have continued their learning focus about space. The children have learnt lots of new facts about our solar system and astronauts. The children have learnt about astronauts from the past (such as Neil Armstrong( and present (astronauts like Tim Peake) within our language for thinking sessions.

During our continuous provision, the children have been busy demonstrating their independent skills by cutting out playdough stars to match a given number, making junk model rockets, and building communication skills with space small world.


At the end of the week the swans did an amazing job making their own star biscuits.