Living Things and Life-Cycles
Week 4
5th - 8th May
Seeds and Plants

This week, our focus topic has been the life cycle of a plant. We had a go at sequencing and singing the life cycle, and read lots of stories to further our learning.

    

This week in our phonics and literacy lessons we have been reading and writing the letter ‘r for rat.’ We used our known letter sounds to try and read and write the word, ‘rat’ by segmenting and blending the letter sounds.

To support our use of this sound, we used a variety of materials to make our own rabbits.

 

We also practised our handwriting skills, neatly writing our names on our Mini Marathon certificates to celebrate all the running we did last week!

 

Our topic work has included; planting sunflower or runner bean seeds and learning how to look after and care for them.

 

We also released the rest of our butterflies into our nursery garden.

We painted beautiful sunflowers, carefully choosing the correct colours.

In our mathematics work we used 2-D shapes to create our own flowers and measured the heights of different sunflower pictures using cubes.

 

Next week, we will be learning the letter sound, ‘h for hat’ and talking about human growth.      

Living Things and Life-Cycles
Week 3
27th April - 1st May

Chicks and Chickens
This week, we have been learning more about the life-cycle of a chicken and continuing to observe and hold our seven nursery chicks.
Everyone had the opportunity to hold one of the chicks.

    

    

We used a computer programme to sequence the three different stages of the chicken life-cycle.

    

We mixed play dough and used this to create the different life-cycle stages of a chicken working in groups.

    

We used different sized circles, paper pieces, pens and sticky eyes to create our own chick and chicken pictures.

    

In our phonics lessons we have been reading and writing the letter u and it’s letter sound.
We have been practising our name writing.

    

In our maths lessons, we have been counting, recognising and sequencing numbers to ten.

    

Our first five butterflies emerged from their cocoons, and we released them into the nursery garden.

  

   
We all had fun running around the school field and took part in the mini-marathon.

    
Next week, our letter sound will be, ‘r for rat.’ We will be learning about seeds and plant growth.

 

 

Living Things and Life-Cycles
Week 2: 20th - 24th April
Frogs 🐸

This week, we were excited to see our caterpillars hanging from the lid in their pots inside their cocoons!

 

We also took delivery of some chicken eggs in an incubator. We are waiting very patiently for the chicks to hatch and have been watching them closely for any signs of the chicks hatching.

  

We have also been learning about the life-cycle of a frog and sequencing pictures showing the five stages of a frog life-cycle from frogspawn to tadpoles, tadpoles with tails and frogs with tails finally changing into frogs.

  

We also spent some time completing some other frog-themed activities, exploring a slimy frog habitat sensory tray and painting/creating our own frogs using shapes.

  

In our mathematics lessons we have been finding lots of different ways to make five to develop a greater understanding of numbers and quantity. The children have been learning to group objects and subitise; to recognise a group of five without counting.

    

In our literacy lessons we have been learning the letter sound ‘e for elephant’ and practising reading and writing letter e.

Next week, we will be continuing to learn about life-cycles, and hope to release our butterflies into the nursery garden.
We hope the eggs will continue to hatch and we will be able to watch and hold the chicks before they go to their new home.
Our new letter sound will be ‘u for umbrella.’

Welcome to the Summer Term.
Our topic this term is Living Things and Life-Cycles.
Week 1 - Caterpillars and Butterflies
13th - 17th April

This week we have been reading the story, ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle and other caterpillar stories.

We have been observing our real living tiny caterpillars and can’t wait to see them grow and their metamorphosis into butterflies.

As part of this, we have been talking about the different stages of a caterpillar's life cycle, and putting this process into order.

 

We printed shapes and patterns on one side of a butterfly’s wings, folded them in half to print and create our own beautiful symmetrical butterflies.

  

  
We also used 2D shapes to continue our focus on symmetry and create a large symmetrical butterfly.             
We printed a repeating pattern to make our own caterpillars.

   

We retold the story of the Very Hungry Caterpillar by sequencing pictures from the story, and counting out the different amounts of fruit from each day.

  

We have been continuing our phase 2 phonics and learnt a new letter sound, ‘k for key.’

  

In our 'My Happy Mind' learning, we have been following our characters through different stories, songs and activities; learning about both what makes a good friend and how to be a good listener.

 

Next week, we are continuing to learn about different life cycles; continuing to watch how our caterpillars grow and receiving an exciting delivery of some chick eggs! We will be continuing to recap all of our previous phonic letter sounds, alongside our new sound, which will be 'e for elephant'.