Welcome back to the summer term.

This term we are looking at the natural world and people who help us.  We continue to look at seasonal changes and life cycles whilst investigating mini-beasts, tadpoles and frogs.  

Some of the stories we shared include “The very Hungry Caterpillar”, “The Bug Collector”, “The Monkey Puzzle” “Mad about Mini-beasts” and “Walters Wonderful web”.

Our literacy sessions and dictated sentence writing have been inspired by these texts.

We learnt about and celebrated Sir David Attenborough as he turned 100 years old.  We found out about his passion for the natural world and all those that live in it.  This inspired us to write some pledges about how we can help protect the planet and changes we can make to ensure we help look after it.

We loved sharing the story of Omar and the Bees by Helen Mortimer.  We researched these tiny creatures and found out just how amazing they are and the impact they have on our natural world.  We learnt how they help to pollinate plants and flowers and create honey for us to eat.  Did you know that bees communicate through a “waggle dance”? We had great fun making up our own dances. 

We also found out that bees are a protected species as are stag beetles.  Because of this we found out more about the habitats these creature need and thought about how we could provide homes for them in our school environment.  We made some seed bombs for bees using wild flower seeds, soil and mud and we placed these all around the woodland and meadow areas, hopefully these will grow in the spring time and we can welcome more bees into our garden!

Whilst exploring in the garden we found a stag beetle and some stag beetle lava.  Because these are endangered we built our own habitat in the woodland out of rotten wood, branches and leaves and moved them out of the way of any dangers.

Halfway through the summer term our tadpoles finally started to change into froglets and then fully formed frogs! We were mesmerised by this and couldn’t believe how high the tiny frogs could climb up the glass! Once they started to change, Mrs Bullen took them back to their original pond so they could get back to their natural environment.

When thinking about people who help us, we shared the story of “Zog and the Flying Doctors” and joined Julia Donaldson (the author of the story) and some real life flying doctors to share the story.
The flying doctors explained their job, how they travel in their helicopter to help people who are seriously hurt and need to get help quickly and need to get to hospital.
Axel Sheffler, the illustrator of Zog, then demonstrated how to draw the character. We had a go at this ourselves and are very proud of the results!

We had an exciting trip to the local Fire Station where we meet some firefighters.  They talked to us about their jobs and we looked around the fire engine, used the hose and saw as they went off on a real life emergency!  Another crew came to visit whilst we were there, it had a ginormous ladder that could go really high! The firefighters showed us how far up it could go, it was taller than the buildings in the local area!

In maths we have been looking at numbers to 20 and beyond, addition and subtraction and continuing to develop our knowledge of number bonds to 10.  We have looked at sharing and grouping, saying when this is fair and not fair as well as beginning to explore the concept of odd and even numbers.  We have been completing and creating repeating patterns and exploring symmetry.