Stick Man

We started back to school after the Christmas holiday with sharing the story of 'Stick Man'. This is another one of Julia Donaldsons amazing stories. It linked nicely to all things relevant to the children - Christmas, Winter, Snow....

We used the story to explore something called 'Talk 4 writing'. This is  what the teachers/ teaching assistants had been learning about during one of our Professional development days in early January. This involves learning a story and retelling the story using actions and words. We then developed retelling the story through drawing pictures to help with each of the actions. Some children even then went onto drawing and making their own story maps to retell a part of the story. 

We followed this up with going on a stick hunt to collect sticks do that we could make our own stick people.

Stick Man, oh Stick Man...

We  found out about trees in Winter and then recapped on the different seasons and what happens to the trees during each of these seasons.

We painted bare trees using our hands send arm and then printed these on our paper.

We then thought about the different changes and colours seen throughout the season and oainted bubble wrap pieces to use to print onto each tree.

Enormous Stick Man is nearly as tall as we are!!

Our new Winter wonderland role play area is under construction...

And then we needed some egg-spert advice! 

One of the children had found son egg shell on their way to work. 

We tried hard to identify it by looking on the Internet. We thought it could belong to either a robin, blue tit or a collared dove. Mrs Hough suggested selling in Mr Hough to help us. He came in and listened to our ideas and opinions and thought we had some good ideas. He ruled out the robin and the blue tit for the same reasons - the egg would be too big for the birds to pass. He agreed that it belonged to a collared dove.

And here's something for us all to pause and think about. It was the final slide on my course today and speaks volumes to us as parents and practitioners working with young children: