Wow, what a jam packed week we have had!
We started our week by learning about Georgia O’Keeffe and the painting she did in 1928, nearly 100 years ago, called Red Poppy VI. We had a go at reproducing the painting using wax crayons, felt-tipped pens and water. We did a brilliant job! Mrs Cruise brought in some red poppies from her garden, she had picked them the night before. We applied one of our drawing club words to them, it was flourish. One of the poppies was flourishing but the rest had died. Later in the week we looked at some of the purple poppies that are flourishing beside the school pond, we then had a go at applying the skills we had learned creating our red poppy pictures to independently creating purple poppy pictures, our pictures were really impressive.
Mrs Cruise brought in some new physical play and sand toys, we loved playing with the rainbow ball, until it went over the hedge, and had great fun with the cheerleader’s pompoms. We also enjoyed the Velcro ball and bat game and trying out badminton. We were able to share and work together to invent games with rules and turn taking.
We also worked together brilliantly to build a garden centre out of our large construction toys, and we made imaginative use of props. We had great fun role-playing in it. Individually we worked with Lego to make mini-green houses, when our structures were stable our grown-ups helped us to wrap them in cling film to represent the glass. We were very proud of them. We enjoyed sensory play with seeds, this soon turned into role-play with the hobby-horses having a great time munching on the seeds. Indoors we looked at seed packets, we applied our cutting, sticking, folding, drawing and writing skills to making our own seed packets. Mrs Cruise is wondering how our cress is getting on and would love to see some pictures.
In literacy we have been focussing on writing simple sentences, it is time for our end of key stage assessments and being able to write a short sentence such as ‘I can run.’ is part of this, Mrs Cruise asked us to keep practising this at home as-well as at school. I maths we have learnt about sharing, this is how we begin to understand division. We have also kept practising our doubles and number bonds to 10 to help us be ready for maths in Robins.
We were very lucky this week as we had a volunteer come in from the charity Blue Cross to work with us and Robins, she helped us to learn about being safe around dogs. She taught us that dogs have feelings just like us and how to tell how a dog is feeling. We learnt the Three C’s for interacting with dogs; CHECK with the owner, CALL the dog by tapping our thighs and saying hello and finally COUNT three strokes while stroking the dog on its shoulder, then step away. She taught us that sometimes dogs can feel scared and that might make us feel scared too, when that happens we shouldn’t run away, we need to Stand Still And Chill or Be A Stone.
We had a great week of learning and are looking forward to working on our new herb garden next week!
