It’s been a busy week finding out all about the lifecycle of a butterfly.
The children have loved listening to the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, as well as retelling the story using the pictures. They have been having a go at remembering what the caterpillar ate each day. We also talked about healthy and non-healthy food and the children used the food from the role-play Cafe in our class Garden Centre to sort food into healthy and non-healthy food.
We have also been rolling playdough into small balls and made some fantastic caterpillars. The children challenged each other to see who could make the longest caterpiillar. It was wonderful to hear them use lots of vocabulary related to size eg. long, longer, big, bigger, tiny, small, little etc.
In maths we have done lots of counting; counting how many balls long our playdough caterpillars were, matching amounts to the Numicon using counters and butterflies and painting fingerprint caterpillars.
We also looked at pictures which showed us the lifecycle of a butterfly. The children were encouraged to describe what they could see and were able to remember what happened; the egg, the caterpillar, cocoon and then it turned into a butterfly. They have also loved painting butterflies as they folded the paper in half, painting on one side and then transferring the print on to the other side. It was great to see them going back to the art table to paint their own pictures and practising this technique independently.
As always, the children love the construction area and we love listening to them as they explain what each part of their model is. We've had castles, motorbikes and trains this week and this area continues to support the children as they work together negotiating and sharing ideas with each other.