Amazing Animals

What a cold start to this half term. A perfect opoortunity to learn about animals that in in colder places. 

We began  reading the book - 'Thats Not My Penguin' 

We talked about where they live, what they look like and what they might eat. The children loved playing in our Small World Arctic set up, pretending the penguins were diving off the ice and into the frozen pool. 

There were lots of questions around the other animals in the set up so we played what's in the bag, naming and looking at their features. 

The children all loved the Polar Bears so we decided to make some of our own. 

This was a super activity to talk about the colours and features of the animal and also develop our fine motor skills as we pinched and pulled the cotton wool to make the fur.

We talked about the Ice and how the Polar Bears and Penguins slide across the ice. We created our own sliding game of air hockey on our very slidey floor. The children loved pusing the discs across the floor to their friends and counting how many times they scored a goal. 

Dear Zoo!

This week we have moved on to looking at Zoo Animals. 

We read the story 'Dear Zoo' and the children were very good at joining in with the repeated phrases and also guessing which animal was coming next.

We talked about what a zoo is and how some animals live in zoos to keep them safe and us safe too. 

The children used lots of different construction materials to create crates and pens to keep the animals safe.

One of our children even built an animal catcher just in case the animals were to escape.

We look at the other animals that were sent by the zoo and noticed that one of the animals was the same as our sound of the week. 

We looked at the patterns and colours on some of our toy snakes, noticing that snakes can be many different colours and patterns. 

We looked at Snakes talking about their shapes, how they move and their patterns. The children made some super threading snakes using their fine motor skills. We also noticed that snakes come in a range of different sizes, colours and patterns. We decide to make some painted snakes painting repeated patterns using our paint rollers. 

Strengthening out fingers for writing. Rolling out the playdough and pushing in the cookie cutters to make playdough animals.

Snap, Snap, Snap

We are getting ready to begin our teeth brushing sessions in class so this week we have read the story

'The Very Selfish Crocodile'

The children loved reading the story and finding out interesting facts about crocodiles. 

Here we are finding out how big crocodiles are and how many Elmers would be the same as one crocodile. We then used our very big piece of paper to have a go at drawing crocodiles, making sure we drew plenty of big sharp teeth.