17 May 2022
We started beach school today by reading our story of the week ‘Follow the Swallow’. In the story, Apollo the swallow makes friends with a blackbird called Chack in garden. Apollo then travels to Africa and Chack sends him a message from the garden via different animals. At the end of the story, the birds reunite and Apollo discovers Chack has a nest with three blue eggs in it.
In the story the four seasons are mentioned, Chack talks about how the tree changed colour when Apollo had left for Africa. So the first thing we did was talk about the four different seasons and which season it is now. We sorted a selection of pictures and organised them, recognising the changes that happen to leaves on the trees and how they can change colour before falling off.
We sat in the sand dunes and talked about the different animals that were in the story. We wrote down some of their names and the places that they lived in, discussing the different sounds that they begin with. We drew pictures of the different animals too.
Apollo is a beautiful swallow, we looked at a picture of a real swallow and talked about its different colours. We then created a huge swallow in the sand and decorated it using what we could find on the beach. Collecting seaweed for his wings and tail and lots of shells for tummy. He looked just like Apollo!
There were lots of different birds in the story that lived in the garden. We talked about the birds we knew and we drew some of them in our sketchbooks. We spent time adding small details to our birds, drawing their tiny feet and pointy beaks.
We then played a funny game of ‘whispers’. We sat in a circle and each came up with a sentence and whispered it to our partners. We tried our best to pass the message on correctly but occasionally we got it wrong just like Apollo did in the story. There were a lot of giggles doing this!
In maths, the reception children practised their number bonds to ten using numicon to show each one. Nursery had to look at a number card and build the correct number of sand castles to match it.
To finish the day, we talked about how to build a bird nest and we thought about what we could use to make some of our own. We collected seaweed, marram grass and sticks and put Apollo the swallow in them. He loved all of the nests that we made for him!
We started the day with our English lesson. The children worked hard to write some beautiful descriptions of the area around them. One memorable description was ‘The waves are roaring like the crowd at a football stadium’. In PE we did an excellent job at our long jump, relay and also over arm throwing. It was then time for a well-deserved snack. After snack time we started our maths lesson. The year 1 children focussed on making clocks in the sand and using marram grass to show O’clock and half past. The year 2 children filled the measuring jugs with sand to show our understanding of measuring of a ml scale. The children had a chance to have some independent learning time before we headed back to the golf club for some chips and fish fingers. After lunch we returned onto the beach as it was time for science. In science we were talking using an animal and thinking about its food chain, ordering food chain cards and also a matching activity. To end our day at the beach we started to draw the beach huts at the end of the beach.
We all had a fantastic day in the sun.