Our 'Core Text' this half term is:

'Jack and the Beanstalk'

by Ladybird First Favourite Tales

This term we have been writing in role as different characters from the story e.g the cow, Jack and Jack's Mother. We have acted out the story and recreated scenes from the book. We used recycled materials to make our own beanstalk and then wrote captions and sentences to describe it. We used our Phase 3 phonic knowledge to make sure we could spell every word using our newly learned phonemes, digraphs and trigraphs.

The consonant digraphs we have been learning are:

ch, sh, th, ng

The vowel digraphs and trigraphs we have been learning are: 

ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

We used recycled materials to make our own beanstalk and then wrote captions and sentences to describe it using Phase 3 digraphs/ trigraphs.

We have been acting out the process of a beanstalk growing. We watched a time-lapse video of a bean sprouting out and slowly growing into a tall beanstalk. We used dance to recreate our version of the growing process. We then made up our own poems about beanstalks:

I am a beanstalk - grow, grow, grow

I am a beanstalk - tall, tall, tall

I am a beanstalk - floating high

I am a beanstalk - in the sky

We have been planting and growing our own beanstalks in class. We planted beans in plastic cups using compost and trowels. Every day we water them and have placed them next to the window so that they get lots of sunlight to help them grow. We can't wait to see how tall they grow. I wonder which one will grow the tallest?

During Forest School sessions we have been enjoying planting seeds in the planters. We also planted some potatoes so that hopefully we can make chips in the Summer 2 term. We planted violas in the small planters and water them every day.

We have been using the flowers grown in Forest School to make observational paintings/ drawings. We have grown some beautiful bright yellow daffodils and learned all about the parts of a flower. We have learned new subject specific vocabulary such as :

                                      stem                                       

roots

petal

leaf

flower

We have also linked our outdoor learning to include activities to enhance early reading and phonics acquisition. The children have really enjoyed playing our beanstalk reading game, combining mathematical opportunities into our play.

We have been looking at life-cycles this term. We have looked at the life-cycles of plants, frogs and butterflies.

We went to the Forest School and observed the changes over time including the changes to frogspawn. We observed the frogspawn changing into tadpoles, froglets and then frogs.

We used magnifying glasses to get a better glimpse of the process changing over the weeks.