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
Life Skills.
One of our favourite life skills is chopping fruit for our fruit salads, yummy!
The children focused on the different skills and techniques that are needed to chop soft and hard fruits. We used different hand motions when chopping a banana in comparison to chopping an apple.
Everyone participated and focused brilliantly. Amazing work!
Expedition biscuits.
For our story in expedition, we decided to make our own little pigs. We used pink icing with some marshmallows and googly eyes.
we enjoyed eating these as much as we did making them!
Sports Day.
The children practiced jumping on spots, balancing on stepping stones (floor is lava), wiggling the hoops on our hips and practicing to balance bean bags on their heads. Great work!
Cooking in Crew.
Last half term the children focused on spreading and cutting different textures of food. We made jam sandwiches, fairy bread, fruit cutting and to link in with our expedition book, ‘Goldilocks and the three bears’, the children made bear faces with rice cakes. All the children enjoyed the new flavours.
Pancake day
Tuesday was the best day ever! We made pancakes, and it was VERY messy (but that’s the fun part!).
First, we mixed all the ingredients in a big bowl. The flour went poof! everywhere, and our faces turned white like snow. We stirred and stirred with big wooden spoons—our arms got super tired, but we didn’t give up!
Then, we scooped the gooey pancake mix into little cups. It was sticky and squishy, and some of it even landed on the table (oops!). But that’s okay because we were having so much fun!
They were the BEST pancakes in the whole wide world!
Final Product Creations
The children have been using their creative skills in expedition. Using fine motor movements and discussing the features of plants, to create water colour paintings with a range of lines and shapes that will be used within the community. Well done F2.
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!