After the storm

We arrived at school on Friday to find that storm Doris had caused some damage and mess to our outside area.

What better start to the morning then to read the story 'After the storm' and talk about our experiences of walking home in the storm and what it was like. 

In the story, the storm has blown over a big oak tree, home to lots of the forest animals. Percy sets to work organising the animals in working together to clear up after the storm and helping in finding/making new homes for them all.

Cherry class were very much like the animals in the story. We all got our Wellington boots and coats on

and headed outside to assess and clear up the damage. 

We had toys which had blown away.

Twigs blown in which needed sweeping and collecting.

The wooden house had blown over and the chimney had broken off.

Oh no, this was going to take some strong ladies to stand it back up. How strong the wind is to have knocked this over.

More twigs and leaves to be swept and collected.

One house standing, now the chimney needs repairing....

Loading up the wheelbarrow again.

Pots all sorted and on shelves, house standing again and all the toys and resources now back in place. It's hard to believe there ever was a storm.

Dragons egg

The children have been showing a great interest in eggs. Then, dragons were a big hit, after finding out about the animals in the Chinese New Year story. How could we combine these two egg-citing interests into some of our child led planning? Well, we did! Last week we had a very important delivery. We were given a box, addressed to the children in Cherry class and labelled 'fragile'.

We talked about what 'fragile' meant and came up with other words which mean the same. 

We also had a special visitor, Miss Garrod. Miss Garrod was a pupil at East Harling a long time ago and started out in Cherry class (Otherwise known as Reception) with a teacher called Miss Small ( now known as Mrs Hough!). Miss Garrod is now a reception teacher herself!! 😀

We opened the box and discovered a giant egg!

There was a letter attached to the box. We decided to open it and find out about our important delivery.

The letter was from Mummy and Daddy dragon and they were asking for our help! Their nest was broken and they needed us to make a new nest to help protect the egg and keep it safe whilst they re-built their own nest. 

The children set to work. We had to think about what the egg needed - to be kept warm and safe- and then collected the things they thought would be good nest materials. They found sticks, wool,leaves, feathers, moss.. Each item was thought about and an explanation as to why it should go into the nest was given. "It's warm"; "it's soft"; "cosy"; "velvety"; "strong"..... Great reasons to be added to the nest.

It was decided that a fence was needed to protect the egg from danger. The children set to work building one.

And then a sign was made to warn people about our important egg.

(Watch out from the egg because it's not hatched yet😀). 

The Mummy dragon also sent us some pretend baby dragon eggs for us to turn into dragons of our own..

. What did they need? Shiny scales, long tail, fire breathing mouths.

Joshua left behind his dragon that he'd brought to school that morning.... That was lucky! We could use this to look at the different features we needed to add to our dragons!! 

Hope the dragons have been behaving over the holidays!!!

Reading cafe

On Thursday we held our second Reading cafe. The focus for this cafe was to share how we develop children's ability to retell stories using actions and then how they can tell stories using pictures by way of a story map.

We enjoyed sharing (again) the story of ' Owl babies'. It is important to note that we want children to really get to know a few really good stories, and so, they will need to hear them often. Owl stories is one of the books recommended for Reception aged children.

So, we listened to the story and then I chose a part of the story for us to work on putting actions to. This normally would be done over a period of time and would have been a longer section. I chose the beginning but we might choose middle/end parts to work on with other stories.

We then went onto showing how we link these actions to develop using pictures ( actions from earlier) to re tell the story. 

Here are some of those lovely story maps.

(There were 3 baby owls, Sarah, Percy and Bill. They lived in a hole in the trunk of the tree. The hole has sticks and leaves and owl feathers. It was there house).

The children enjoyed making owl stick puppets - puppets are a lovely way for young children to tell stories and take on roles of different characters. 

There were other story activities out for the children to enjoy and develop imaginative and creative story telling.

Stick puppets and puppet theatre.

The children also enjoyed using big headbands with pictures of the characters from the story on them.

And there were other reading and writing activities for the children to enjoy.

Owl stories...

Using sounds to spell words. Daddy's as well as children😉

Fishing for phonics...

We hope that those who were able to attend enjoyed time with your children and that this gave you an insight into how you can develop story telling and writing at home. Thank you to those of you who helped and supported children who didn't have a visitor too. 

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: