Year R
Summer Term
All about owls
Over the last few weeks, we have been learning about owls. We had lots of 'wonderings' that we wanted to find the answers to, and we were lucky to be able to ask our questions to an expert on our school trip to the Hawk Conservancy.
At the Hawk Conservancy, we took part in an owl workshop where we got to feel an owl feather and meet some of the owls who live there. Did you know owls fly silently?
We watched the Birds of Africa show. During the show, different birds flew around the arena. Some of them flew so low they almost touched our heads!
We also had lots of time to visit all the birds at the Hawk Conservancy. The biggest owl was the Eurasian Eagle owl and the smallest was the burrowing owl. We even met a friendly robin!
Did you know an owl swallows its food whole, in one gulp without chewing it? Then they cough up a pellet which is made of all the bits their body doesn’t need. In school, the adults pulled apart some owl pellets to see what was inside. We discovered that the owl (Captain Bigglesworth) had been eating chicks and squirrels!
Orienteering
Over the last few weeks, the children have enjoyed completing several orienteering courses in our garden area. They have learnt to read a map to help them find the things we have hidden. They have shown great teamwork skills – helping each other if they are stuck but also not telling people where things are hidden. We plan to set up more courses after the half term break.
Under the Sea Art
This half term we have been practising our skills of observational drawing, colour mixing, cutting and collage to create our own under the sea pictures.
First, we experimented with mixing primary colours to discover how to create the perfect ‘sea’ colour.
We agreed we needed to mix blue, yellow and white. Then we painted the background to our picture.
While these were drying, we used our observational drawing skills to draw different sea creatures that we wanted to have in our pictures. We needed to look carefully at the image we were copying and think about the size and position of different body parts.
After that, we carefully coloured them in. We have been working on colouring in one direction, staying in the lines and not leaving white spaces.
Next, we cut out each of our sea creatures and stuck them onto our sea background. We have spent lots of time practising using scissors to cut around tricky shapes and we are getting really good at it!
Finally, we used tissue paper to collage seaweed and stones on to our pictures.
Spring Term
Chinese New Year
We started this term with a flight to a mystery country. The children showed their passport at ‘security’ and then boarded the aeroplane. After a long flight (with some turbulence), we landed safely and explored our new surroundings.
Using the clues on the tables, the children worked out we had landed in China.
“I know that’s the China flag.”
“I know because there are dragons in China.”
“Pandas live in China.”
“I’ve used chopsticks before with Chinese food.”
We decided to stay in China for a few weeks to explore the country further and learn about how New Year is celebrated. In our continuous provision, we have enjoyed our Chinese role play areas – a café and an aeroplane, using chopsticks, learning about Chinese numbers, making playdough snakes along with lots of other exciting things!
We listened to a story called The Great Race. This story tells how the Chinese zodiac calendar was started. We listened to the story several times and then worked together to sequence key parts of the story. Then we had a go at writing some of the story ourselves.
We have also learnt a lot about how Chinese New Year is celebrated. We wrote letters to Mrs Wyeth asking if we could celebrate Chinese New Year at school. She said, yes!
We had so much fun celebrating Chinese New Year. We came to school wearing red clothes for good luck and cleaned and tidied the classroom to get rid of any bad luck. Then we hung our decorations up – we had made lanterns and bunting. Mrs Bond came in and helped us to make dumplings for our feast. In the afternoon, we enjoyed our special Chinese feast and did our dragon dance.
We finished our topic by reflecting on what we had enjoyed the most about our celebrations.
Autumn Term
Ish
We have been reading the story Ish.
Ish is a story about a boy named Ramon who loved to draw, and he would draw wherever he went. One day when he was drawing, his older brother came into the room and laughed at his drawing. This made Ramon very angry, and he crumpled up all his pictures. He gave up drawing because he just felt that his drawings weren’t perfect. His sister took from him a crumpled drawing and ran away with it. Ramon chases her and discovers that she has been putting up his drawings in her room. His sister shared her favourite picture, and it was one of the flowers in a vase. They said that it looked vase-ish. This gave Ramon the confidence to draw again. He just drew an ish picture each time.
The children enjoyed discussing this story. We spoke about feelings and if it was kind what his brother said. We thought about times when we may have been feeling like Ramon and how we could solve it. So, we thought it would be nice to do our own versions of vase-ish drawings. We had some flowers in a vase, and we created an observational drawing of what we could see. We particularly focused on the shapes and colours.
Exploring Autumn
We went on a walk around the school grounds, to talk about the season change. We looked for lots of changes such as the leaves falling, berries and the leaves changing colours.
During art we created some leaf rubbings with the leaves that we collected. We thought carefully about the colours that we would use. These matched the colours that we saw on our walk.
We also practised our fine motor skills and used scissors to cut out some leaves so we could put up a tree display in our classrooms.
Little Red Hen
It all began with the arrival of a mystery bag … the children worked together as detectives to work out that all the things in the bag belonged to the story of the Little Red Hen.
We listened to the story lots of times and drew our own story map. Then the children enjoyed using the puppets to retell the story with their friends.
A few days later, we received a very important letter …
But we had a problem – we wanted to help the Little Red Hen but we didn’t know how to make bread. Again, the children did some great detective work and found out the ingredients we needed and how to use them to make bread. We wrote a letter to tell the Little Red Hen we could help make some bread and Mrs Parry and Mrs Mead bought the ingredients we needed. Finally, we were ready to work together to make bread. We made a roll for each of us and some extra rolls to send to the Little Red Hen. It was delicious!
After we had made our bread for the Little Red Hen, we were interested in what other breads from around the world looked and tasted like. We tried baguette from France, sour dough from Egypt, Bagel from America, Flatbread from Greece and Tortilla Wraps from Mexico. We had a split on our favourite bread with the baguette and bagel coming out on top. 
Settling In - September 2024
The new Year R children have settled in really well and have spent their first few days at school exploring the resources in their classrooms and outdoors. They have had so much fun!
