The Big Bus Adventure

During our final half term of reception class we will be going on a Big Bus Adventure. This will be an exciting opportunity for children to learn all about cars, buses, aeroplanes, boats and hot air balloons. As well as looking at various modes of transport the children will also be looking at maps and understanding the importance of maps. 

Our job is to make sure the passengers onboard the Big Bus have a fantastic adventure. When we are expert bus drivers we will be rewarded with our very own Big Bus tickets which will take us on an adventure of our own!

The Hundred Decker Bus - Mike Smith

This half term we will be using The Hundred Decker Bus by Mike Smith as our Key Text. In this story the bus driver is bored of his daily route so the driver decides to take the bus down a lane he has never been down before hoping for an adventure. The bus ends up on an exciting adventure which means everyone in the town wants to ride it including our reception children!

Making  buses in the playdough

After listening to the story and meeting the bus driver we got to work thinking about all the features of big buses. We made our own examples in the playdough area.

Understanding the World - maps and directions.

We talked about how we can help the Big Bus make sure it doesn't get lost and how maps can be used. We looked at different maps and talked about what they're used for. We then helped direct the bus around the map using positional language and clear instructions. 

We have been on a trip to the woods to look for signs of Summer. We noticed a lot of flowers which attracted a lot of bees and butterflies. This then got us thinking about how nature and the weather changes in the Summer months. We loved watching the bumble bees collecting pollen. 

While we were in the woods we went minibeast hunting and carried out some art activities. We hammered the colour out of leaves and petals.

We have also enjoyed painting the bus from our key text. The children carefully thought about the features of a bus and described their buses in full sentences.

You’ll agree they look fantastic on our wall!

Look at our fantastic sentence writing about our buses!

This week we received a parcel! It contained some ferry’s and a letter asking us if we could help make a boat that could float and hold a toy car without sinking! 

We set out to work! The children has a very good understanding of sinking and floating and they loved problem solving to help them make their perfect boats. We discuss key features of a boat and what they should include! 

We then wrote a sentence about our boats. We have been trying our best to write on the line and remember our finger spaces ready for Year one!

Vrrrrroooom!!!

This morning we learnt who Lewis Hamilton was as we found out he wanted a place on our adventure bus! We discovered a race track outside and practiced being race cars to drive around the track. We had so much fun! The children were then fully immersed into racing cars and designed different tracks all day! 

We have enjoyed drawing and labelling our own race cars and race tracks too! 

The children chose to make cars out of junk modelling too.

We have loved making race cars in our large construction area! The children carefully thought about their design, trialled and tested until they were happy with the end product! Look how happy the boys are!

This week we also enjoyed designing our own racing cars, we labelled them and even wrote a sentence about them.

We were all very excited to hear about our special kangaroo visitor. Mrs Burke and Miss Murphy were very surprised to find that a kangaroo had jumped into our classroom. We set to work finding out where Kangaroos come from by looking in our Atlases. We found out lots of facts about Australia and the animals that live there. We talked about which mode of transport we could use to get the kangaroo safely back to Australia.

We wrote the names of the animals you can find when you visit Australia.

Our new reception garden

The children really enjoyed exploring the new reception garden area. We used tyres and planks to creates roads and tracks. Some of the childrechildre obstacle  courses for the other children to use.

This week we received a letter from the train drivers at Middleton Railway asking us to find out all about trains. The children set to work reading 'The train ride' story. We ordered the story and made a small world table so we could retell the story with our friends. We particularly liked the tunnel part of the story.

We were all so excited to find a hot air balloon on our school field. We had so much fun getting inside the basket and playing games with the huge balloon. We used fantastic comprehension skills to think about where the balloon had come from and who had been inside it.