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!

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!