Beechwood Primary School

Foundation Stage Blog – 4 May 2018

This week the children have continued their topic about growing, with the focus being on plant growth. On Monday the children talked about their weekend news with a partner and then they were challenged to draw a picture and write simple sentences about their weekend during independent learning time. Monday’s Maths focused on the concept of addition and how to count on using a number line to find the answer.
On Tuesday morning the children received a letter from the school care taker about helping him to grow some sunflowers. The children looked at the sunflower seeds and talked about how to plant a seed. During Tuesday’s adult-led activity the children planted their own sunflower seeds, which we are watching grow in school initially and then the children will bring their sunflowers home to plant in their garden. Tuesday’s learning challenge was for the children to write instructions and draw pictures to explain how to plant a seed. In the afternoon the children learnt about the sunflower life cycle and we looked at a non-fiction book to show what will happen to their seed at the different stages of the life cycle. The children are being very patient observing the changes in their sunflowers at school and are ensuring that they water their plants regularly.
On Wednesday morning the children listened to the Jack and the Beanstalk story and the children were challenged to think of different things they would of found if they had climbed the beanstalk as their learning challenge. It was lovely to hear the children talking about their family with the rest of the class and we would like to thank all the parents for sending in their family photos. At the end of the day the children listened to a topic themed book e.g. Eddie’s Garden. Wednesday’s adult-led activity involved the children counting 2 groups of beans and then adding them together. The children continued this learning outside by measuring how many daisies were in their circle and then how many daisies they had with a partner.
On Thursday the children went on a mini-beast hunt around the school grounds. The children worked with a partner to record their observations. When they returned to the classroom the children shared what they had seen and where they had found the different mini-beasts. During their group time some children practised reading CVC words and some children practised reading tricky words. The children scrunched up their word up into a ball and threw it in the middle of the circle and then they chose a new word to read. During Thursday’s adult-led activity the children drew pictures of mini-beasts and labelled them/ wrote a list of the mini-beasts they had seen during the morning/ wrote a list of mini-beasts they had seen with explanations of where they found each mini-beast.  The children’s learning challenge on Thursday was to find the different mini-beast pictures around the classroom and record how many of each mini-beast they saw.
On Friday the children received a letter from Jack asking them to help him with the challenge of finding out which container would hold the most beans. The children chose a container, estimated how many  cups they thought it would take the fill the container and then accurately measured how many cups it took to fill the container. The children’s learning challenge was to write a letter to Jack to explain what they had found out from the investigation. Before lunch the children looked at how their caterpillars had changed since last week and made their own recordings of what had happened. It has been wonderful to see the children developing their confidence to write independently over the last few weeks. Friday’s adult-led activities focused on addition, doubling, halving and sharing.
This week’s handwriting has focused on the letters i, l, t, u and y. The children have been learning about tricky words and have been reading the words the, to, no, go, he, she, we, my, me, was. It would be great if the children could have a tricky word hunt around the house to help the children to read their tricky words. During this week’s PE the children moved like mini-beasts e.g. wiggle like a worm, fly like a butterfly, slither like a snail, buzz like a bee and crawl like a spider or a ladybird. In ICT this week the children have been using 2Simple 2Paint a Picture to draw a picture of a mini-beast.
In addition to our busy week the children have been engaging in a variety of activities during their independent learning. Some of which include: labelling min-beasts; Jack and the Beanstalk writing; mini-beast word hunt; measuring and comparing mini-beasts; hungry caterpillar dominoes; Exploring the giant’s castle in the role play area; measuring the capacity of containers using rice; painting sunflower pictures using forks; and looking at growing books.
We are continuing to inspire the children’s love of reading and additional information about how you can support your child’s reading at home can be found at: https://www.booktrust.org.uk/globalassets/resources/misc/reading-with-your-child/reading-with-your-child-booklet-for-parents.pdf
This document is available in up to 28 different languages. This term we introduced the ‘Book Worm’ challenge where children earn a place on the book worm display when they read every day for seven consecutive days. The FS staff check the children’s reading diaries on a Friday, please ensure that you sign your child’s reading diary to show when they have read at home.