Blog 26.1.24
Our book this week is ‘The Bowerbird’ by Julia Donaldson. In the story Bert the bowerbird has made the most perfect bower nest, complete with a pretty purple flower, and is hoping it will help him to meet the bird of his dreams. Even though he uses all his efforts to create a beautiful display it’s not enough to win over Nanette but Nanette isn’t the right bird for Bert and at the end of the story he meets Jean who is a much better match for him.
Our Rainbow Challenges this week have been related to this story:
Writing – Nursery: Write about a bowerbird and tell an adult what your writing says. Reception: Write a description of a bowerbird and use the sounds that you know in your writing.
Maths – Nursery: Count the birds with an adult. Reception: Count the birds and circle the correct number
Funky Fingers – Nursery: Do up a zip from the bowerbirds nest. Reception: Do up all the zips.
Creative – Nursery: Paint a bowerbird. Reception: Paint a bowerbird in a bower
Playdough– Nursery: Make a bowerbird using playdough. Reception: Make a playdough bowerbird and write a label.
Drawing – Follow the instructions to draw a bird
Outside – Nursery: Look for some birds. Reception: Look for some birds and count how many you see
Most of the Reception children completed all their challenges and gold challenges this week. Well done!
In maths this week the Reception children have been learning about heavier and lighter and balancing. They have also been practising learning pairs of numbers that make ten. The Nursery children have continued to practising counting make sure that they touch the object they have been counting and have been looking at amounts and saying which has more and which has less. We have also been measuring sticks from the bowerbird’s nest.
This week in Read, Write Inc. the Reception children have been learning some new sounds and practised ones they had previously learnt. The nursery children have been playing lots of different listening games and some children have been playing rhyming and initial sound games.
In our music theme of ‘Action Songs’ we have been learning about tempo. We listened to Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns and decided whether each piece of music was fast or slow. We did this by holding up a green pencil for fast and red pencil for slow. We have also been learning about a real bowerbird with Mrs Threlfall and watched how he made a bower and what he put inside. The Reception children wrote something that we found out. One morning we went to the quarry to have a go at making a bower of our own by collecting lots of sticks. We also all did our outdoor challenge of looking for birds in the quarry.
Our RE theme is ‘Which places are special and why?’. This week we found out about a gurdwara which is a special place for Sikhs. We have enjoyed exploring the model gurdwara.
We also learnt about Burns Night. We found out about Robert Burns and listened to a story ‘There’s a hole in my bagpipes wee Hamish wee Hamish’ by Kate McLelland. The Reception children thought about how they would fix the hole and wrote about it. We did some Scottish dancing, coloured some tartan and made some handprint thistles. Some of the parents send us pictures of people in kilts so we had look at those too.
This week our Starfish star of the week was Anna for doing some great writing. Well done Anna!
Our story next week we will continue to use ‘The Bowerbird’ by Julia Donaldson as our story of the week.