Easter time!

MAKING OUR EASTER NESTS
We always have fun creating with food, and the children were very eager to get stuck in!

     

  I heard some great vocabulary being used by the children - steam...melt....runny...thicker...sticky like glue...not enough...the syrup is falling ziggy zaggy on the big spoon...

 The children were very excited about Easter, and as well as many conversations about bunnies and eggs, I also shared with them the Christian Easter Story in a simple way using happy and sad faces to talk about how the different people felt in the story.

BRILLIANT INVENTION!
I was curious to find out what was happening when I saw some children behind a box and heard lots of giggling!
I was told they had made a marshmallow machine and sure enough requests were being made for marshmallows to be delivered down the cardboard tube!

We extended the play by adding plates and the till with money. One child helped make a sign and another said we needed an open and closed sign. Evie proudly showed me the holding plate she had made to catch the marshmallows to make it easier!

Great opportunities for counting and speaking and listening to each other.

LOOK AT WHAT ELSE WE HAVE BEEN DOING!

Lots of painting and colour mixing

Fine motor skills practice drawing round shapes

Rolling out the salt dough we made and cutting carefully around shapes.

What a great Easter picture!

 Happy Easter to you all!

No time to stop, too busy!

PLAYING AND LEARNING OUTDOORS
The children have been full of ideas and making the most of the wonderful spaces we have outdoors.

              

Time for some music making...

                                    

Where will the water go if I pour it down here?...

Some serious digging!

Mmm, vanilla soup was being cooked
in the outdoor kitchen

DOUGH, GLORIOUS DOUGH!






The children had an instruction card and made their own salt dough this week. They were very excited, and made sure they did it correctly!!
                                                                                    

There were lots of opportunities to talk about measuring and the need to follow the instructions.
What is a cupful or a spoonful? Vocabulary including full, nearly/almost full, half full, overflowing was used a great deal.












And then of course followed the joy of playing with our very own dough!
stretching it, rolling it, squeezing it, making a pancake to toss...





SPORT RELIEF DOUGH DISCO!
We dressed in our sports clothes and brought money to help children and families who don't have as much as we do. We learnt about a little girl called Jinnat, in Bangladesh, who can now go to nursery because of people collecting money like we were doing.

Then it was time to have oodles of fun not just exercising our fingers and arms with dough disco, but giving our whole bodies a workout!

The Banana Splits song was ideal for bopping to!

These are just a few great times from this week. Mrs Courtney struggled to choose what to put on the blog this week, as there was so much great learning going on! Keep it up Little Conkers!

Our amazing world!

UP AND UP, HIGHER AND HIGHER

Following on from the children's fascination with looking at the world on Google maps last week, we talked about how the world would look from space. The children then created the world using lots of materials from around the room. They were surprised by how much water was in our world!

Later in the week children wanted to create the world!

The children asked lots of questions about space and the moon. We watched Tim Peake taking off for the space station and afterwards the children made their own rocket and blasted off into space!

We thought about what you had to learn to be an astronaut and we looked at photos of the fixing jobs Tim Peake has to do when he is wearing his thick gloves.

We tested out whether wearing thick gloves made a difference to doing things with your fingers. It did!

MORE GREAT MAPS...

Maps, directions and World Book Day

FREDDIE THE FROG NEEDS OUR HELP!

Freddie the frog left a message for Little Conkers to come to find him - he was in one of the rooms and was feeling lonely and asked them to come quickly - he had sent them a map to follow.

The children wanted to set off quickly to find Freddie. "He will be sad if he is on his own" said one child. The children were all confident they could follow the map!

So we set off down the corridor. 

There were lots of opportunities to use positional words such as left, right, turn, opposite, across.

The children worked together well as a group, and finally we found Freddie in the staff room. There was a big cheer!

When we returned to the classroom some of the children wanted to make their own maps.

They then went in search of frogs, wolves and each other following the paths on their great maps!

SENDING THE BEEBOTS ON JOURNEYS

 
The children decided where they wanted Beebot to go, and we thought about what direction and how many times to press the direction button. 

  Trying to get Beebot to travel on the map to the staff room to rescue Freddie the frog was quite a challenge as there were lots of turns and different directions to think about, but it was pleasing to see children taking time and persevering.

There were some very excited cheers when they managed it!

Children continued to be interested in maps through the week. Bridges and train tracks were drawn and built.

We looked at our school on google maps and then zoomed out, pretending we were going up in an aeroplane going higher and higher away from the school until we were looking at the whole world! The comments and questions from this were brilliant... "I can see snow!...look! the ocean...there are a lot of green fields round us... it looks very small when you are up high...what is that yellow bit? Is it sand?

A range of maps were explored very closely!!

WORLD BOOK DAY

On Thursday we dressed up as characters from some of our favourite books, and listened to lots of stories during the day - we are so privileged to have so many wonderful books!