Summer Term Week 5

Our annual Hungry Caterpillar Picnic Party happened this week and it is such a wonderful experience for us all – we all get together in the back garden – all the Sun and Moon and Star children come together in one group to enjoy the releasing of our butterflies! We look after our tiny caterpillars for about 3 weeks in total and then after a couple of days outside of the cocoons they are ready to fly away. We take time to read the story in the Forest School garden, surrounded by nature and we buy all of the foods in the story to look at while reading and then to enjoy as a picnic. Then we sing our caterpillar song (we will perform this at the summer fete on the 22nd June!) and then release the butterflies. We had two picnics this year – Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning and the photos are all on the blog this week.

We have been really busy with other learning experiences as well this week – we have had a literacy theme and to keep our groups engaged and excited we have been learning about countries and cultures in circle time.

Sun and Moon – Using our mark making skills to label maps, learn the names of countries and continents, making passports and talking about where we live and where we have travelled to. Drawing our holidays and experiences and writing the names of continents and countries and adding in letter sounds and letter recognition to help us begin to learn the basics of reading by learning what letters look like.

Stars – have looked at differences in our world – different countries (hot and cold), differences in people and how we look, different animals in the different habitats and countries and have made the different flags from countries around the world.

We have had a focus on shape work this week with the sun table being home to many different shape games. Sorting shapes, making pictures from the shapes, making shape monsters to help sort the shapes and creating shapes from lollipop sticks too. We will continue some more work on this topic next week as well.

In other areas we have had the baby role play out as a child led activity, we have been working on big construction in the garden to add to our castle and this will also carry on next week as the children have really enjoyed working on their own creations and a group inside discovered that we have metal in our walls and were able to build a high tower using the magnetic shapes! Engineers in the making and with this in mind we are going to have a set of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) challenges next week!

Next week is our last week before the half term break and then we will be back for 6 weeks before finishing for the summer.