29 June 2022
We had a lovely day at beach school today – despite the rather grey start. We started off the day with art. We were looking at drawing the landscape. We faced the castle and talked about what we could see. We talked about the horizon line and discussed what was in the foreground and what was in the background. We discussed the fact that we could just see outlines and not actual details. We then lightly sketched the view ready to paint back at school.
We then moved on to doing some PSHE. We talked about ways we could help look after our environment and then made a poster on the sand to promote this. We then headed up to the golf club for lunch, before returning to the beach for some maths.
In maths we took a bucket and filled it full of things from the beach; stones, sticks, shells and feathers to name a few. We then talked about how we could turn these items into a pictogram. Once we had had a go at making the pictogram we drew a tally chart to correspond with it.
We finished off the day with some English. We listened to a kenning called ‘Beware’ by James Carter. Then we had a go at making our own kenning up. We chose an animal and then wrote a 5 line kenning.
This week the children in Starfish class have been showing an interest in rocks and stones. One of the class brought in their own rock collection, so this week at the beach we read the story ‘Peter’s Pebbles’. The story is about a little boy who paints rocks to look like animals. In the story his rock collection comes to life!
After we had listened to the story we wrote a list of all the animals in the story. The nursery children did a brilliant job of writing the initial sounds of the animals.
We then collected lots and lots of different pebbles in our buckets and then we sorted them just like Peter did in the story: large ones, small ones, thin ones, fat ones, round ones and flat ones. After that we chose our favourite stone and spoke about why it was our favourite.
In maths the Reception children sorted all the pebbles that were left in their bucket and ordered them from the smallest to the largest, it took a bit of problem solving but they rose to the challenge! The nursery children continued with learning about heavier and lighter by using the balances to talk about their pebbles being heavier or lighter.
One of children wanted to go on a Starfish adventure in the dunes. This was a great opportunity to practise learning left and right. We followed some narrow paths and we each had a turn to say left or right to choose the next path when we came to a junction.
We had some time playing with the animals from the story and then we used the pebbles to make pictures. We made houses, dinosaurs, faces, unicorns and lions. The pebbles were lots of different shapes so we thought about what the individual pebbles looked like and used chalk to add details.
We looked at a map like Peter did in the story and found out where the different animals came from. We then moved like the different animals in the story, our favourite was pretending to be a crocodile! The last thing we did before we went back to school was to throw our stones in the sea just as Peter did at the end of the story.