Carrying on from our work on hospitals last week we spent this week learning about 'our body'. We explored what different parts of the body are called, the role of the skeleton and what some of the different organs in our bodies do. We went on a body hunt around the outside area, drew skeletons and made life size bodies of ourselves. We also talked about how we can keep our bodies healthy.
This week we have celebrated 'Black History Week' and learnt all about Mary Seacole. We turned our role play area into a hospital and invited a nurse and doctor in so we could find out what being a doctor and nurse is like now and compare it to what it was like for Mary Seacole. We explored some of the ingredients she used to treat soldiers and found out what they were used for. We learnt about Jamaica where Mary was born and tried some food and had a go at some Jamaican dancing. We built boats outside like the boats Mary would have used on her travels.
Our Drawing Club story this week as been 'The Little Red Hen'. We have been learning how bread is made. We have been exploring flour and even trying to make our own flour by grinding up oats. We used the outside equipment to make a combine harvester. We put on a puppet show of the story for our friends where we made tickets for the performance. Later on in the week we made our own bread - 'Hedgehog rolls'. We spent time kneading the dough and waited for it to prove before shaping the rolls and baking them to take home (they were very yummy!). The next day we tried to make our own butter by shaking cream. We tasted it after lunch by buttering it on toast which was a lovely end to our week.
We started 'Drawing Club' this week and our first story was 'Not Now Bernard'. We learnt lots of new words to do with this story and used our imagination to draw lots of different things such as 'what could the monster eat to take away the taste of Bernard?' or 'where did the monster come from?' We then wrote codes to make funny things happen to our pictures. Over the weekend some of us went on an autumn walk and brought in lots of things we had found and we used them to turn our mud kitchen into an autumn cafe where we have been busy making signs and taking orders. We had our Harvest Festival where we performed a song to our families and after we decided that we wanted to make a tractor in the outside area so we could harvest the crops.
We made a vegetable stall in our classroom where we began selling some of the vegetables from Oliver's vegetables. We made price labels and wrote shopping lists of what we wanted to buy. We then had a country fayre where we awarded prizes for the heaviest potato and for the longest runner bean. We used our scales to find the heaviest and used cubes to measure the length of the beans. In the story of Oliver's vegetables, Oliver only likes chips so we thought about what vegetable chips come from and what else you can make from that vegetable. We used this to do some tasting. We tasted chips, mash, boiled potatoes, crisps and roast potatoes. We talked about them and then wrote our name under the one we liked best.
This week we have been reading 'Oliver's vegetables' and been talking about which vegetables we like. We have been doing lots of chopping vegetables in our mud kitchen and using different vegetables to create art work in our creative area. We have talked a lot about our hedgehog promises this week and what they mean. Our first one is ' to be kind' and we have been showing how we can do this when playing with our friends by helping them when they need it and taking turns when we are playing.
What a great start to school life we have had this week. We have spent lots of time exploring our environment, making new friends and learning lots of new routines. The weather started off a bit rainy but that hasn't stopped us having lots of fun!