If you go down in the woods….

This week began with Nursery taking a trip into the woods (within school grounds) to explore and experience what it would be like to be inside a forest as part of our first case study; Where in the world will this story take you? Our first anchor text of this case study is the classic fairytale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The children were so excited to go on an adventure and were also a little bit nervous about who or what they would find in the woods, as they explored using their senses.

Once inside the woods the children were relieved to find there weren’t any wolves, bears or Gruffalo’s! We used our senses to think about what we could see, hear, smell and feel with both our hands and feet. The children were read the story inside the woods to set the scene and bring the story to life. They really enjoyed it and listened attentively whilst holding their sticks, leaves, flowers and ferns.

Once back in the classroom the children shared thoughts of their experience and completed a class sense map, noting down ideas of what they could see, hear, smell and feel. There were some beautiful thoughts and sentences that were communicated from the adventure which really helped the children to understand what a forest is. We have used this knowledge and experience to inspire large scale pieces of artwork, which will be part of our final product in terms of creating a story setting. The children also watched a short video of a virtual tour through Sherwood Forest, in Nottingham, where they tried to spot Robin Hood! They then compared that to the experience of our school woods in Norton and talked about what was the same and what was different? They soon realised that forests were much bigger with larger trees, thicker bushes and more undergrowth. They also learnt that not only animals but people could also possibly live in a forest like in olden times. You have been great geographers Nursery! Here’s a sneak peak of our artwork…

A week where Fairytale wishes do come true..

To immerse and hook our Nursery children into our latest learning expedition “Once upon a time- who is hiding in the pages of this book?” We hosted a Fairytale Tea Party, with real china tea cups and where everyone came in their finest party clothes! The sun shone for us and the children really enjoyed spending special time together experiencing new things. To help the children understand what happens and how people behave at these splendid events, we first learnt a tea party song to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it”. Why don’t you ask them to sing it to you?

In every good fairytale plot there is a mystery object that helps the hero or villain to succeed or cause mayhem! The children took part in a mystery object hunt, finding and naming the objects as they found them.

To embed the children’s understanding of these objects further and bring them to life we played a game of Pass the Parcel with the real objects hidden inside. This time the children discussed what the object was, how it feels and what it could be used for? The children had lots of fun and were really respectful and kind to each other by passing the parcel quickly and carefully to their friends.

As the week drew to a close the children work independently or in pairs as they wished, to decorate mystery objects using a variety of mediums such as felt tips, collage and special watercolour pencils. The importance of staying within the lines of the pictures was modelled to the children to help keep the shape of the mystery object, meaning that we would really need to be “Concentrating Crocodiles”. It was lovely to see the children who wanted to work in pairs, working out what they would like to create and choosing different children to work with, who wanted to create the same thing – being “Teamwork Tigers”. This beautiful artwork will be used to help create our final product. Well done Nursery, you were very pleased and proud of your beautiful work, as was I!

Clay Animals and The Songbird Cafe

Crew Chadwick has enjoyed taking part in some great ‘outdoor crew’ sessions this week, led by Mrs Jackson. In our first session, the children enjoyed sculpting clay into different animals. Take a look at some of our creations…

Our number one rule in Class 1 is to be kind, therefore we loved our next crew activity. We got to make bird feeders for all of the local birds and hung them in our Norton Songbird Cafe. Within minutes of them being hung on the tree, a beautiful robin was already feasting away! Looking after nature is something we spoke about in our last expedition, ‘How do we show we care’. It felt great, carrying out this act of kindness.

Crew Chadwick would like to give a BIG shout out to Mrs Jackson for planning and resourcing such great activities. We loved it! Thank you 🙂 xx

Crew Outdoors

Crew Goodyer have had a lovely week taking crew outdoors and enjoying some early Spring sunshine!☀️ Mrs Jackson led our crew on Tuesday when we made some wonderful clay animals and this morning we walked around our grounds looking for signs of spring. Being out in the fresh air and sunshine is a great way to start each day.

Family Learning

We were joined by lots of grown ups this afternoon. We were really busy planting cress heads to observe in our classroom. – I wonder who will have the craziest cress hair! We also made a pop bottle green house to take home and watch grow. We filled in the first part of our seed diaries too. We can’t wait to see the photographs of what you have grown on ClassDojo!

Thank you to everyone who came and joined us.

Mrs Parsons and Miss Tinker xx

Hot Chocolates And A Story

To finish off our time doing XP Outdoors this half term, Crew Gate and Crew Tinker gathered around the campfire and enjoyed a delicious hot chocolate. While drinking our hot chocolates we worked together to tell our very own story… All about a treasure hunting piarate in the desert.