Summer 2 2022 What a Wonderful World!

At the beginning of our final topic, ‘What a Wonderful World’, we used our Talk for Writing text to describe a familiar route. Discussing routes and locations and becoming familiar with positional language e.g. ‘in front of’, ‘behind’, ‘across’, ‘over’ in our mathematical learning. We then created an obstacle course to train really hard for Sports Day and children were able to match their developing physical skills to decide whether to crawl, walk or run across a plank, depending on its length and width. At the beginning of our challenge, some children were a little hesitant and nervous crossing the planks and by Sports Day, they had used their skills of resilience and perseverance to confidently walk and run across the wooden planks and other obstacles.

‘Shark in the Park’ was our fictional ‘Talk for Writing’ text and after daily oral retellings of the story with a story map and actions as a class, children were able to confidently retell the story individually using the repeated rhyming patterns. We had the opportunity to visit Barker’s Park again to look at the seasonable changes; and, to our relief, there was no shark in the park - or was there?

Throughout the year, there has been daily teaching of fun Phonic activities and Maths. This has prepared the Clever Kittens with the skills and knowledge they need ready for their transition into Reception. We have had some great learning experiences and it has been an amazing year.

Summer 1 2022 – Clever Kittens

Our topic for Summer One has been ‘Sunshine and Sunflowers’. Five tiny caterpillars arrived after half term and we watched them grow and grow, eat and eat and become big and fat. The caterpillars made a cocoon around themselves and we had to wait for two weeks, before one of them nibbled its way through the cocoon and out popped a butterfly. When the caterpillars had hatched, we fed them with sugary water and flowers. We then left them for a couple of days to dry their wings and then released them outside. This experience has helped us in our ‘Talk for Writing’ to sequence the life cycle of a butterfly. We discovered how butterflies and some other insects have symmetrical patterns. Now we know what ‘symmetrical’ means. If you’re not sure what symmetrical means, then ask a Clever Kitten. The Clever Kittens have talked about and identified the patterns around them. For example: stripes on animals, designs on socks and other clothing. We created our own repeating patterns, using Duplo, cotton reels and sticks, leaves and pebbles.

We have had some amazing home learning around our topic and a Clever Kitten Grandad supervised his grandson with a hammer and other tools to construct his amazing Bug Hotel, supplied with its very own ‘vacancies’ and ‘no vacancies’ sign. In school, children made minibeast homes using 3D shapes to create them and talked about their mathematical names and properties. We used magnifying glasses to go on a minibeast hunt and explored their habitats.

This half term we have become Sunflower Experts. We have talked about the Sunflower Lifecycle and searched information on the internet and in books, and discovered that sunflowers can grow in many different colours. They can be blue, red, white, purple and pink. We wanted to each plant our own sunflower and so we have to solve two problems 1) Did we have enough plant pots for everyone and 2) Did we have enough sunflower seeds. Children gave some good ideas how we could find out this information. We planted the sunflowers and we are taking care of them in our mini-greenhouse. We are going to monitor how the sunflowers are growing by taking photographs and placing them on our own calendar. We have also been learning about the famous Artist, Vincent Van-Vogh who inspired us to paint sunflowers. The magnificent paintings are displayed in our classroom.

What a creepy crawly half term both at school and at home!