The Enormous Turnip

Our main focus this half term is looking at plants. Growing plants, looking after plants, parts of plants and stories about plants. Its a perfect time of year for this as the children are beginning to see all the flowers and trees around us changing. 

We have spent lots of time looking at seeds and planting flowers for our Elmer garden. We have potted plants and sprinkled wildflower seeds to see if they grow. 

The Elmers have been very keen gardeners (sometimes a little too keen!) and have been watering out new flowers regularly.

The Elmers have been listening to and learning an famous traditional tale 'The Enormous Turnip. 

We have read the story, looked at real Turnips, pretended to be the characters and enjoyed playing with the small world characters and retelling the story by ourselves. 

Mud Glorious Mud!!!

In Elmers we are very luck to have our own mud kitchen. Mud kitchens are a great way for children to promote creativity - deciding what to put in a soup, communication and language - talking to our friends and teachers about our ideas and what we are doing, practising our maths skills - counting out the number of spoons of mud we have used for our cake and not to forget the very important skills of sharing and turn taking. The list goes on. 

This term we have been lucky to have had some extra help in Elmers. Miss Chadwick has made our Mud Kitchen a truly inviting space and has encouraged the children to use this resource more frequently. Her focus has been on developing the skills of sharing and turn taking and the Elmers have had a wonderful time getting messy in the process. 

Here are some pictures of the children getting messy. 

We have also been developing our fine motor skills. Fastening and unfastening coats and cardigans can be very tricky with little fingers. Our other visitor Miss Gellion has been helping us for strengthen the muscles in our hands and fingers and hand made us some amazing resources to practise on. We are pleased to say we are getting better and better at this which is also great for our independence. 

Hurray, Sunshine!!!!

What a lovely, sunny start to the new half term. The sun has been shining and the children have been smiling. 

We have already begun our new class text 'Titch' by the Author Pat Hutchins. 

The children listened well as Mrs English read the book and were very keen to make predictions about what might happen to Titch's tiny seed. I'm sure they will remember if you ask them or you could have another look at the story here. 

Our new topic is 'In the Garden'

The children have been exploring seeds and flowers on our Tuff Tray and have enjoyed our new role play flower shop. We have even been looking at flowers in our Maths and comparing the sizes of our flowers using some new vocabulary - taller, shorter, bigger, smaller. 

We have also been very excited this week to introduce the children to using powder paints to allow them to mix and explore colours. We are so proud of all the children for their efforts trying to remember the different steps and producing some fantastic art work.