How does your garden grow?

What lovely weather we have had for the start of the summer term. A great chance for the Elmers to get out in the fresh air. 
this term we began with a familiar story, 

‘The Enormous Turnip’ 

The children thoroughly enjoyed listening to the musical retell of the story on CBeebies as well as listening to Mrs English reading the story and trying to get us to guess what happens next. 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001xqr5/musical-storyland-series-2-2-the-enormous-turnip

Throughout the week the children have had lots of fun with the story. Here they are with Mr Rist role playing the characters as he reads along. 

Here we are using our painting skills to paint Turnip colours looking at how the dark purple changes as we and more and more white to the paint to create the colours we saw on the real turnips we examined. 

We passed around a real Turnip and used some super words to describe what it looked like and how it felt. The children were curious to see what the Turnip looked like inside so we cut it open. We were surprised to see that it was yellow, wet and apparently smelled sweet! 

Planting

After reading the story and talking about how plants grow, the children have been planting their own seeds this week. 
We couldn’t find turnip seeds so have had to make do with Sunflowers. 
The children were great at listening to and following instructions to successfully plant their own seeds. 
 

we will keep you updated on how our class seeds are growing as we continue to take care of them over the next few weeks.

Finally, 

it’s always nice to share some of the independent activities our children enjoy throughout the week. Please look through these photos to see our building creations, our mark making in different areas, and much more. 

Jaspers Beanstalk 

Our story this week is Jaspers Bean stalk. The children were keen to see how well Jasper cared for his plant as they have been doing such a good job. 
They loved telling me which day comes next in the sequence and guessing what Jasper would do next to look after his Bean. 
After reading the story and seeing how big Jaspers bean grew we looked at the seeds we had planted. We talked about how much they had grown, which was the biggest and what had helped them grow. 
some super maths language being used and great knowledge of how to look after plants. 

We have been looking at different flowers that we might see in our gardens at this time of year. We painted our own Hyacinths with a focus of using a steady hand to move the paint brush along a drawn line and strengthening our fingers by squeezing the tissue paper to create the purple petals.