Waggle dancing

SThis week we have been finding out lots about bees. We learnt that they do a special dance to tell their friends where to find nectar and pollen, called the 'waggle dance'. 

We acted out being bees and collected "pretend'nectar from 'pretend' flowers.

 We then returned to our 'pretend' hive where we performed the waggle dance to tell our fellow bee friends where to find food!!!

 In a nutshell, this is what really happens with real bees in the wild!! 

Hail in April?!!

The children were so excited when they returned from play and the hail began. We had to stop everything, put on our coats and go and explore this weather by first hand experience.

We talked about what hail was and looked at how it melted in our warm hands. We observed the shapes and the changes that took place.

We were very excited to add the hail picture to our weather chart!! 

Happy birthday Queen Elizabeth

We enjoyed celebrating Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday.

We wrote cards to wish her a happy day.

We made invitations to our afternoon tea party.

We decorated and made Royal crowns.

We made Union Jack's.

We enjoyed acting out being the Queen herself...and her little pet....

We made cucumber sandwiches and scones. We enjoyed sharing these with Hazel and Sycamore class.

We went outside and Miss Grant read the story 'The Queen's knickers' which we all found very funny!

We had a lovely time celebrating a very special day. 

We were amazed to see just how old 90 is and used our Numicon to count in groups of 10..

Horatio comes to visit us

Annie and her Daddy brought Horatio the tortoise into class on Friday. He has recently woken up from his long winter sleep and we were keen to find out about this. We found out that Horatio is a self hibernating tortoise, which means that he digs his own hole in which to sleep in. We also found out about the kinds of foods he likes to eat and watched him eat some dandelion leaves at school. Horatio is an outdoor tortoise but after his long sleep needs to be warmed up and comes inside to spend time under a heat lamp ( much like our baby chicks after they had hatched). Horatio was a bit slower than usual and so Mr Denniss suggested a warm bath could help. We put some shallow warm water into an old tray and let him paddle his feet a little! We found out that Horatio was about 60 years old and will live to be about 80!! Wow!

Mud, mud, glorious mud!!

Having begun our new topic on minibeasts, we want our joint Reception display to be about minibeasts and where we find them.

We started work on the 'background' thinking about where we would find minibeasts, starting at the ground ( or below in fact!) and working upwards.

To make the soil what better way than to take off our shoes and our socks and walk in it, printing 'real' mud onto the paper! The children really enjoyed this fabulous sensory experience! The photos clearly show what fun they had!

And of course, we gave our hands and feet a good wash afterwards!

I wonder what other sensory art work we can come up with for the rest of the display????!!!

And for those who didn't want to get their feet dirty, they still had lots of fun digging and exploring to find out what minibeasts they could find... Oh, and looking at what happens when we add water to the soil!! 

Collecting minibeasts and using our minibeast spotter guides to identify what we have found.