This half term we have explored the autumn leaves and trees through sensory, painting and learning. Lots of different colours and textures. The children have colour matched, picked their own leaves and made beautiful art work.
Learning about Autumn
Category : Understanding the world
Investigating our outdoor area
To support our expedition, we had a discussion around a tray of items that Miss McGlone had brought in for us to look at. There were binoculars, insect pots and magnifying glasses. We talked about what each item was used for and how we could use them in our outdoor area. Working in small groups, we took the items outside and took it in turns to see what we could discover using this special equipment. Unfortunately, we didn’t find many bugs or insects – just a worm who tried his best to escape from Hunter’s fingers! We noticed birds in the trees and flying through the sky by looking through the binoculars and we saw lots of plants growing in more detail after looking at them through the magnifying glasses. We are going to continue to use our equipment throughout the year to see what wonderful things visit our outdoor area in the different seasons!
Life Cycles of a Butterfly
The children have really enjoyed learning about the life cycles of a butterfly. They have been using their fine motor skills to create their own butterfly life cycle. The children can now recite the stages using actions.
Animal matching
In expedition, we read a beautiful book called ‘Counting Creatures’. It introduced us to lots of different animals and spoke about their babies whilst also telling us how many babies that animal would typically have. We really enjoyed the book and thought that the pictures and lift up flaps were great!
We used some of the pictures from the book to match the adult animals with their babies. We practised using some new vocabulary such as owlets, tadpoles and caterpillars. We worked extremely hard in our groups to make sure we had matched up each animal to their babies correctly. We noticed that some of the babies looked just like their grown ups only smaller, but some babies did not look like their grown ups at all – they were a little trickier to work out but we showed great resilience in trying to find the right match!
Ian’s Farm visited Carcroft!
On Friday, we had a special visit from Ian, who is a farmer from Leeds. He brought along some of the animals from his farm and allowed us to stroke, touch and brush them as he told us lots of information about them.
Thank you so much to Ian for coming in and bringing his lovely animals to our school!
Crew F2 get Christmassy!
Last Friday, Crew F2 got very Christmassy in their classroom! Take a look at us decorating our Christmas tree!
Paddington and the grand tour
In expedition, we read ‘Paddington and the grand tour’ and talked about how Paddington was excited to visit lots of landmarks in London on an open top tour bus.
We worked as a crew to create our own open top tour bus, with Hayden as our bus driver! We then took it in turns to sit with our friends in a cafe and shared cakes, just like Paddington did. Finally, we built a beautiful palace, similar to Buckingham Palace which was a stop on the tour bus.
Getting our classroom Christmas ready!
On Friday, we had a lovely time decorating our classroom tree.
Snow!
The children really enjoyed exploring snow this week. We discussed what clothes we need to wear in order to keep us warm in the cold, snowy weather. We also brought snow inside and explored what happens when it melts.
Remembrance Day 2024
Crew McGlone have spent time over the last week discussing why it is important for us to think about those people who helped and continue to help to keep our country safe, and thank them for everything they do. We created fork paintings of poppies that Miss McGlone put together into a wreath for our whole school Remembrance Day display.
We then also made our own poppies using apples and carrots to print with inside a laminating pouch. Once they were dry, they were put through the laminator and we have put them on our classroom windows.
Firework printing!
To celebrate Bonfire Night, Crew McGlone created firework pictures. We used cardboard tubes to print glitter paint onto black paper to look like fireworks exploding in the night sky. They looked really effective!
