W/B 4th March 2024

Five Little Ducks go swimming one day.

Maple children have had another busy, but fun week.  There were whoops and screams of happiness when the children saw five baby ducklings and their mummy duck on the pond in the farm (the children’s role play corner has been a farm).  The children instantly erupted into the nursery rhyme ‘five little ducks went swimming one day’.  Without being asked, the children each took away one duck at the end of each verse and loved practising their 1:1 counting each time. 
 

The maple children asked if they could practise their counting on the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) in St Mary’s room.  To warm up and remember to use one finger on the board to ‘move’ items, we started with shape monsters the children interacted with last week.  They had all remembered to use one finger and had all improved with their shape and colour recognition too.
We played five little ducks and it was lovely to see previously shy hesitant children counting with confidence.  The old saying is definitely true, ‘practise makes perfect!’

Our maths focus was the language of size.  The children gasped when the saw the size of an enormous bath duck and then a duck so tiny is was the size of an adult’s little finger nail!  It certainly helped the youngest children use words such as ‘big’, ‘small’ initially and then adding in biggest, smallest.  The children continued this activity of verbalising the sizes and then putting them in order, independently.

We obviously needed to create some ducks too, the children were busy painting the bodies, adding a head, google eyes, feathers and feet and were very proud of their creations afterwards.

In PE this week with Elm we had the parachute out, which the children always love.  This time, reflecting the rhyme both classes have been reading, we had five ducks and their mummy swimming on the parachute then at then end the children needed to manipulate their parachute to enable one of the ducks to ‘swim away’, you can image the giggles as a duck went flying through the air.

Thursday was an extra special day this week - World Book Week.  The children had the choice to dress up as a character from a book, but the main focus was to bring in their favourite book for us to share.  We had the gruffalo,  little Robin red breast, Harty Potter, the witch, Rapunzel, Batman, little rabbit foo foo, the good fairy, Belle and burgular Bill and Betty and many more characters appearing throughout the day.   The children love hearing stories, every afternoon snack we have stories whilst munching on our snack.  Recently the children have asked for stories during their lunch too, so having extra special stories on World Book Day meant we were enjoying stories and being transported into magical worlds for most of the day- which the children adored.

A busy productive wonderful week.

Thank you for taking the time to help your children dress up and bring their books in, we know how busy life is, so do appreciate all your support.