Over the last two weeks children in EYFS have been exploring the story Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Brown. This links to our current expedition, exploring all the different ways we can travel, as Handa is a little girl who walks a long journey to her friend’s village with a basket of fruit on her head. Little does she know there are some cheeky animals who pinch her fruit along the way!

An exciting activity was using all of our senses to explore a pineapple, mango, avocado, orange and passionfruit that feature in the story. Afterwards we created beautiful work by writing sentences about what we found out.

Then we had great fun taking part in an African drumming workshop. Steve from Unbeatable Energy used percussion instruments to retell an African folktale about an Anansi spider.

He then taught us how to play African drums by tapping along to catching rhymes such as ‘juicy juicy mango!’. The children loved making their own music and dance moves and then performing this to their parents at the end of the day.

A big thank you to the parents who came to watch our performance. We loved that you had an opportunity play the instruments too! It was an experience the children will definitely remember. 🪘🎶

This week we have been hooking into our next expedition titled ‘Would you travel by wheels, wings or other things?’. Yesterday the children explored the book Martha Maps It Out by Leigh Hodgkinson. In the story Martha creates maps of lots of different places including her local village. The children worked collaboratively to notice and discuss all the features of Martha’s map. We then used this as a stimulus to predict what we might notice when travelling on foot around our local area. Were they the same or different to Martha? The only way to find out was to go on a walk…

We walked a circular route around Norton village passing The Royal Hotel, Baps and Wraps, the park, windmill and Junior School playing fields. The children spotted and discussed so many other features of their local area including sign posts, bus stops, passing vehicles, wildlife, pets and people of different occupations. Some children enjoyed pointing out their own homes too!

When we were back in school we looked again at the predictions we recorded about what we might see on our walk. The children’s ideas were fantastic suggestions and we ticked off most of our things on our lists! Well done Class 2 ☺️

Yesterday we said goodbye to the 13 chicks we have been looking after for the last ten days. The children have been fascinated watching them hatch and develop in such a short space of time. When they left yesterday most of the chicks had started to grow their wing feathers and some were even beginning to take flight!

The children in EYFS have helped with cleaning their brooder boxes, changing their water and replenishing their food. Best of all, they’ve loved taking it in turns to hold them. We have been so impressed with how kind and gentle the children have been when handling them.

The chicks were collected by The Happy Chick Company who will now take care of them on their farms where they will produce free range eggs for the supermarkets. We wish the chicks a very happy life roaming the countryside 🐥.