In My Garden...

Throughout this half term we will be basing many of our activities on the following books:

The very hungry caterpillar

Grow it!

Jaspers Beanstalk

Oliver’s vegetables

We will be talking about fruit and vegetables, looking at how and where they grow. We’ll be planting our own seeds and taking care of them to help them grow.  We will be exploring our nursery garden and watching the changes to the plants and trees as Springtime comes along.  Inside the classroom, we are developing a role play area based on a garden centre.  After sharing our own experiences of visiting garden centres and looking at photographs and leaflets, we will talk about what we should sell and make some flowers.

Week 4

This book is a fun introduction to discussions about where our food comes from and which foods children enjoy. 

The little boy in the story, Oliver, only wants to eat chips. 

  Oliver doesn’t care about fresh veg or nutritious food.

He goes to stay with Grandpa and finds many different vegetables growing in the veg patch. 

In the end he digs up some potatoes so can then have the chips he loves.

Vegetable names

“Potatoes! There’s lots, it’s very heavy”

Darcie

“Cabbage, it’s a white one, round like a football”

Farrah

“Spinach leaves, there’s lots in here”

Jack

“Peas”

We looked again at pictures of how peas grow inside the pods.

Elijah

“beetroot, urgh, it needs washing”

Olivia

Peas in pea pods

We had fun using tweezers to collect peas and put them in the pea pods which helps to develop our fine motor skills and strengthen our hands and fingers.

Digging for potatoes

In the story, Oliver wanted to find potatoes so that he could have chips for tea.  Grandpa did some digging in the vegetable patch and Oliver found the pototoes.  We have been looking for potatoes in our compost tray.

We made chips!

We washed, peeled, and cut potatoes and then took them to the kitchen to ask Mrs Cockroft to cook them in her fryer.   A little later, she brought the cooked chips to us.  We all enjoyed our tasty treat!

Potato heads

Week 3

This book focusses on what is needed and what can cause a plant to not grow. It uses the days of the week to show time moving forward and the children can continue to learn these at the same time. This week we are going to be focusing on measuring different sized beanstalks with multi link cubes, talking about the story and practising dough disco using play dough and music. 

Play dough beanstalks

As we had fun creating beanstalks, just like the one that Jasper grew from his bean.   We used built up strength in our hands as we shaped the dough. We used the palms of our hands to roll the dough and our fingers and thumbs to pinch and squeeze the dough as we joined bits together. 

Finger print flowers

We had a go at making finger print flowers using paint and our fingers as tools. We dipped our fingers into the paint then put them onto the paper in a flower shape. We made stalks and petals after looking at photos of flowers. We chose our favourite colours and made lots of different beautiful flowers. 

Scissor skills

We practised cutting out the leaves for the beanstalk using scissors. We held the scissors in our hands in a correct grip and asked for help if we needed it. It was quite tricky to cut around the edges of the leaves but we did a great job and kept going even when we found it hard. 

We measured beanstalks using multilink cubes. We were able to say which was the tallest and which was the shortest and then count the cubes to see which had the most cubes. 

We had great fun at the science fair on Thursday. We got to see what all of the others classes had learnt about in their science lessons and show our parents what we had been learning about. We told them about the different flowers that grow in the garden and what different things felt like such as bark from a tree and soft buds from the branch. It was so much fun and the children loved experimenting! 

Week 2

The book showed us a little boy planting seeds and taking care of them until they grew into flowers or plants to eat. 
We wanted to have a go ourselves so filled some potting trays with compost and planted some seeds.  We had three different types of flower seed and when we looked at them,  noticed they were all different.  We read the instructions on the packets and all had a turn to plant some.  Now , we have to wait for them to grow! 

Our scissors skills are developing and some children had fun at the making table today,  cutting out flower shapes and sticking them on lolly sticks to make their own flowers.  

We used flowers to make repeating patterns 

This is some of our mark making in response to the ‘Grow it’ book. We are practising to write the letters in our name and talking about the marks we make .

The children explored the ‘garden centre’ on mini mash.  They dragged objects/images onto the screen to create a scene.  As they did this they were introduced to new vocabulary “seedling” , “slug” etc.   They loved to see the butterfly and bee fly around,  the caterpillar munch on the cabbage  and the plants to grow and flower. 

We painted our own flowers using egg boxes and paint. We chose our favourite colour and made sure we covered the whole of the egg box. We then stuck pipe cleaners on and a Pom Pom for the middle of the flower. It was so nice to see them altogether and that everyone had made one. 

Week 1

We are really enjoying the story this week and can talk about what is happening in the story and how the caterpillar changes into a butterfly. 

We used pictures to show what happened to the egg on the leaf in the story. 
 

We practised our threading skills which is great for developing our finger strength. We used a hole punch to make holes around the leaf shapes and then threaded the string up and down through the holes. 

We have been busy retelling the story of the very hungry caterpillar. We have enjoyed counting the fruits in the story and how many of each fruit the caterpillar ate each day. We did counting and retelling and loved choosing our favourite food to eat. 

We had a practise writing our names on caterpillars. We found our name cards independently and then copied onto different coloured circles of paper. We were able to form recognisable letters and made marks on the paper. We held our pencils in grip holds and really practised a tripod grip. We then stuck the circles together and made a face. 

We had a go at sharing the raisins out equally between the caterpillars using tweezers. We were able to count the raisins in front of us and had 4. We then gave each caterpillar one raisin. We then upped the number of raisins and shared them equally. I then gave the children 5 raisins and we couldn’t share them so each caterpillar had the same. We took one away and each caterpillar had the same. 

We have learned a new song about a caterpillar changing into a butterfly.