Last week the children had been focusing on our super sounds phonics story “Hooray for Fish!” by Lucy Cousins. We had been thinking about rhyming words within the story and linking the patterns on the fish to our maths work. The children have consolidated their understanding of repeating pattern and have had fun creating their own patterned fish to continue to immerse and decorate our environment with.
During our last expedition the children enjoyed an escape room delivered by an expert visitor, so we recapped on our learning during that session to activate their learning and I constructed a phonics based escape room where the children had to match pictures to uncover a letter shape. They then used the letter shapes to build a simple CVC word linking to our expedition of the where the sea meets the shore to be able to escape from a shark!
Our second exciting text of our continuing first case study; “How can we help save the ocean?” is “Harry Saves the Ocean” by NGK and Sylvia Fae. This week the children entered Nursery to their beloved beach role play area, being trashed by more plastic pollution! This consolidated all of their prior learning from last week as the began to think rubbish in the sea and as you can imagine the children were so disappointed, sad and angered! This time the children had the skills they needed to be able to help problem solve the solution and were very happy to help recycle the rubbish and plastics into the correct recycling bins.
This week the children have been exploring the properties of 2d shapes and have been thinking about how they could use the shapes to create pictures of sea creatures. Here are some photos of their beautiful work.
The children have also been writing lists of all the rubbish and packaging which they have found in the sea, by hearing and attempting to write initial sounds. They were working so hard on their listening skills and produced some beautiful mark making and letter shapes with support.
During our first week of case study one “How can we help save the ocean?” Nursery were outraged to discover that someone had been into Nursery and thrown rubbish, mainly plastic, all over our environment. The children were totally hooked into the case study immediately and shared some of their thoughts about how could we play and thrive in this environment? How did all of the rubbish make us feel? “Sad”, “Angry”, “Messy”, “Cluttered”, “Dirty”, “Shocked”, “Fuming”, “Cross”, “Upset” were some of the words that the children used.
They then drew faces using different emotions to share their feelings. Some children attempted to write initial sounds of feeling words.
This led to us introducing our first key text “The Odd Fish” by Naomi Jones. A story about a fish who finds a lonely “odd fish” (a plastic bottle) who hasn’t got a family of it’s own and they go on a journey to find the odd fishes family, only to find more rubbish. We consolidated our learning by immersing our water tray and sea creatures in plastic. The children attempted to help the animals by putting all of the rubbish into a bin.
On “Wise Wednesday” the children went on a gallery walk to observes real life pictures of creatures trapped, stuck and tangled in plastic. From this the children were guided to created an anchor chart of all the reasons why plastic is not good for our seas and the environment.
As part of our thoughtful Thursday Crew we thought about ways in which we could help the creatures, by thinking about getting rid of the plastic and rubbish properly. The children were introduced to recycling and were shown how to sort materials and put them into the correct recycling bins. The children each had a turn at this and did a great job.
The whole of EYFS last week were well and truly hooked, lined and sunk into our new summer expedition “Seaside Explorers, what happens where the sea meets the shore?”
The children explored various sea creatures introduced to them through our hook text, “Commotion in the Ocean”. Each crew were given a sea creature to investigate and research, using the internet and supporting non fiction texts. The children then compiled fact files about their given sea creatures and created a large scale piece of artwork between them working collaboratively. They had lots of fun doing this and found out the most amazing facts! Each crew have employed all of their artistic talents to really think about how the creatures look and bring out the best in their features.
Both Nursery and Reception classes presented their sea creatures and fact files to each other in our weekly community meeting. They were so excited to share their interesting facts and spoke thoughtfully and beautifully about their creatures and the new knowledge that they now have! We can’t wait to dive deeper into our thrilling summer expedition. Just look at the quality and craftsmanship of our work, the children really were Go for it Gorillas!
Last week Nursery brought case study three of our expedition to a close by thinking about “Where will your vehicle and imagination take you?”
We all bordered the “Imagination Station Train” and pretended as we chugged along the tracks and pulled into lots of imaginary worlds. The journey began by being modelled to the children, encouraging them to think of far away or imaginary places, such as Lollipop land or Chocolate World. As the children became immersed in their play, they began to suggest stops of their own such as Dinosaur Land, The Jungle, Mermaid World, Unicorn Land and Sweetie Town.
The children were then asked if they could go in any vehicle, to any place – Where would it be? How would they get there? And most importantly what would their vehicle be powered by? The children made some wonderful suggestions using their imagination and knowledge, built up from throughout the expedition, really consolidating their learning. We really have been on the move!
In provision the children also explored, used their imaginations and translated their learning to create their own imagination station journeys.
Today in Crew Nursery kicked back with a follow up activity to world book day. They each attempted a Fairytale character Hide and Seek. The children looked for traditional characters and counted how many times they could spot them. Most children attempted to write numbers or make marks to represent what they had found. Amazing work and lots of fun!
On Friday Nursery celebrated World Book Day. Children were so excited to come to school in fancy dress as a book character or with their home made Dr Seuss inspired crazy hat. All children and hats looked absolutely amazing!
We celebrated with a a host of book inspired small world activities where children could create their own stories around their favourite characters.
We made bookmarks to help keep our place in our books….
Finally we used our tales tool kit writing frame to help us tell stories by cutting and sticking characters and drawing our own settings. These were amazing, the story language and creativity that the children used was fabulous.
This year our World Book Day had a Dr Seuss theme – a cat in the hat inspired crazy hat! Boy did the children deliver!! We had everything from gardens to space helmets and minions to globes – the children’s hats absolutely blew our socks off! 👒🎩
In crew this morning, Y2 created their very own crew murals inspired by their favourite books. We took time thinking of a way to represent our favourite books, drawing them and then sticking them all together to create our collaborative artwork.
We also spent some time with The Cat in the Hat himself this morning – we watched the story and then had a go at drawing our very own Cat in the Hats. What a great day!!!
Today we carried on preparing to write our own hunt story!
We revisited what adjectives, verbs and onomatopoeia are and why they make our writing more exciting. Then we split into three teams, each focusing on one type of word. As we listened again to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, we became word detectives, spotting examples in the text to add to our anchor chart.
Next, we helped Mrs Parsons up level a very simple sentence. We added powerful adjectives, exciting verbs and even some onomatopoeia to make it come alive! Some of us even realised we could use commas to make our sentences flow even better — very impressive!
After that, we used our steps to success to improve our own sentences. We became “feature finders”, highlighting where we had used each writing feature — and adding more if we thought we could make it even better.
We now have lots of exciting new vocabulary and brilliant up-levelling skills ready for when we start planning and writing our own Doncaster hunt story! 🐾
This week we have started thinking about writing our very own story!
To help us, we are using a story we already know really well — We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. We were so impressed with how brilliantly everyone remembered the story from Reception. The actions, the repeated phrases, the order of events — amazing!
First, we worked together to practise our sequencingskills, making sure we could put the story in the correct order. Then we really challenged ourselves with a reading comprehension to test our understanding. We had to think carefully and look back at the text to help us.
Finally, we zoomed in on some of the powerful vocabulary in the story — words that might help make our own writing exciting and descriptive.
Now we are getting ready to plan our own hunt story… but this time it will be set in Doncaster, using all the landmarks we have been learning about!
The big question is… I wonder what animal might be in our hunt? 🐾👀
