We have had lots of fun during our first Counting Collections sessions!
Working with a partner, we each chose a collection to investigate. We then thought carefully about how we could count our collection accurately. We talked to our partners, shared ideas and made a plan before getting started.
We then counted our collections, using different strategies to help us keep track and make sure we didn’t count anything twice. Once we were happy with our total, we recorded what we had found.
It has been fantastic to see the children working together, explaining their thinking and developing their mathematical problem-solving skills. We are already looking forward to seeing how our counting strategies develop as we become more confident mathematicians!
This week Nursery have been continuing to think about “What Does Caring Look Like?” This time we have been considering the smallest of creatures and how we can help to take care of them. The children were hooked in to the week with an engaging Tales Tool Kit story, featuring several mini beasts including a spider, a butterfly and a dragonfly. The children used actions, large muscle movements and sounds to help them retell the story of how the Dragonfly, rescued the Butterfly, who had become trapped in the Spider’s sticky web.
They were then introduced to our key text of the week, “Mad about Mini-beasts” which we shared unpicking tricky vocabulary. From the text, each Crew were given a large scale mini-beast to research and decorate. With support, the children accessed fact files about their given mini beast, which was either a Snail, a Beetle, a Spider or a Caterpillar. The children made observations of the creatures and began to create their own masterpieces.
The children painted, pinched, twisted, glued, stuck and sprinkled collage resources onto their mini beasts to make them as eye catching as possible to contribute towards our final product for our expedition.
Nursery children had lots of fun during their outdoor learning this week, focusing on finding different bugs and mini beasts in our lovely outdoor area. The children investigated our new Bug Hotel, Nature Nook area, using magnifying glasses, binoculars and books to check for bugs. They also found a very large spider hiding in the mud kitchen, several ladybirds, a furry white, stripy caterpillar and a white coloured Beetle. From our fact files the children had learned about what kind of habitats the creatures like to live in and this made for some very engaging and meaningful interactions about how we can care for the bugs, by being gentle with them, giving them food and the kind of home they like, such as leaves, mud and wood.
In provision the children made mini beast prints in the play-dough, using their fine motor skills to push toys into the play-dough to create marks and imprints. They also pinched, squeezed and placed buttons to fill up mini beast templates creating pictures and copied and traced mini beast movement patterns to make marks in our messy mark making tray.
Finally in our maths learning we were thinking about patterns that we can see around us and the children learnt new vocabulary identifying spots, stripes and plain patterns. The children used their sorting knowledge to help sort mini beasts with spotty, striped or plain patterns into groups.
This week, Year 2 became mathematicians and detectives as we took part in a Maths Escape Room challenge!
Poor George the baker was working late one night in the cake shop when his mischievous colleague, Keirra, decided he needed a bit more fun in his life. She locked him inside the bakery and left a series of clues for him to solve. To help George escape, we had to work through five different mathematical challenges, collecting a number code from each one. At the end, we used all of the codes to unlock the final puzzle and set George free!
Along the way, we used lots of the maths skills we have been learning this year, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, telling the time and finding fractions. The challenges really made us think carefully and apply our knowledge in different ways.
What impressed me most, however, was not just the maths. I saw fantastic examples of compassion, respect and resilience as children worked alongside their partners. They listened to each other’s ideas, encouraged one another when challenges became tricky and persevered until they found the solutions.
It was wonderful to see so many children confidently using their mathematical knowledge while also demonstrating our character traits. Well done, mathematicians – George escaped thanks to your hard work and teamwork!
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.
Last week Nursery were exploring and for most being introduced to the real meaning of Easter for the first time. We told a child friendly traditional tale of Easter and the children explored themes of whether the treatment of Jesus was fair and kind? Were the people who hurt him “Loving Lions”? They were hooked into the story, using a Good Friday version of pass the parcel. The children pulled out items that were significant to the story and suggested what they maybe… They had some great ideas, grappling that a bamboo cross was “a sign” or “an arrow”. They suggested that the piece of red material was “a towel” or “scarf” and that a crown made from pipe cleaners was “a hat” or a “hula hoop”. They correctly identified bread and fish and stones.
The children carried large construction tubes, testing their gross motor skills, around the outdoor area including up and over the hill. They worked in pairs mostly, being teamwork tigers. The tubes symbolised Jesus cross. The children offered some wonderful ideas around this activities, understanding that Jesus must have been “tired”, “aching”, “sore” and they found it “tricky”.
Throughout the week the children had the opportunity to create an Easter crown using craft materials.
To activate and construct the idea of Easter being a time of new life, the children took part in some planting. They each took turns to plant their own cress seeds, learning what things plants need to survive and grow. The children really enjoyed this activity and were able to explain that plants need “sun”, “water”, “air”, “soil” or “muck” to grow.
Our maths work also centred around traditional Easter and new life last week too as the children recapped on repeating patterns using traditional pictures and baby animals.
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!
Today we built on our learning about length and height by moving on from centimetres to metres!
We explored our classroom to measure different objects to the nearest metre. We had to think carefully about how long a metre really is and decide which tool would help us measure accurately.
Some of us even challenged ourselves further by measuring more precisely, working out the exact height or length in metres and centimetres. That took lots of careful reading of the scale and brilliant teamwork!
We’re becoming real measuring experts — one metre at a time!
This week we started our brand new maths unit all about length and height — and we’ve had a great first lesson!
We practised using rulers carefully to measure and draw lines. We had to remember to start at zero, line the ruler up straight and read the numbers carefully. It was a bit tricky at first, but we didn’t give up!
There was lots of resilience in the room and some brilliant teamwork, with children helping each other to check their measurements and fix little mistakes. We love how everyone kept trying, even when it felt challenging.
A huge shout-out to Tiny the turtle, who showed fantastic determination and got his measuring question right — we were super proud! 🐢✨
We can’t wait to keep growing our measuring skills over the next few weeks!
