Butterflies have been amazing this week. They have grown up so much we can see that they are ready for new challenges next year. We have 3 weeks to enjoy our time together before the holiday. They have been so fabulous, they have all been Superstars this week. It was lovely to see how pleased they all were to hear the Superstar announcement in assembly. There were cheers and hugs all round. 😀🥳🏅🎉

Today, everyone had their photographs taken. The weather was not good so they were taken in the gym. The photographer did a superb job of getting beautiful smiles from all the children. I expect by now you will have seen the proofs and information sent to you. below, you can see them in action.

I hope you are delighted with your photos.
In cooking this week, the children made edible soil, adapting the basic recipe to create their own. They added jelly worms to finish it off. Apparently it was delicious!

Great news! We have a butterfly.

Here we are, beginning a great sort out. We had lots of fun playing games and completing puzzles to check that all the pieces were there.

On Tuesday, some Butterflies were lucky enough to go to The Tower of London with Me, Mia and Ruth as part of the Superbloom project. We have been joining children from Rushall in some growing and planting tasks throughout this term. It was a long and tiring day but we had such a good time. The flowers were really impressive but the highlight of the day was going through tunnels on the coach. Comments such as, ’awesome’ and ’this is the best day of my life ’ were heard. They also loved seeing the Docklands Light Railway trains and learning that they do not have a driver.
I have added some photos below but do also check out the blog post from Tuesday.

All of the children were incredibly well behaved and made the day an absolute pleasure. They did us all proud.

More interesting news! Here is an example of the remarkable perseverance and strength of nature. This pack of sunflower seeds obviously got the water and light it needed. This is what we found. Excellent proof that soil is not always necessary.

Happy weekend.

Paula

Today was a very special day for a small group of children that have been closely working with their peers at Rushall, as they had the opportunity to visit London and attended the Superbloom event at the Tower of London.

The children were absolutely amazing throughout the whole day and enjoyed admiring all the different wild flowers growing around the tower grounds. Many of our friends spotted and named different flowers, as well as recognised some of the insects flying between the flowers. 

During our day we got to meet a real ‘Beefeater’ and also explored the grounds of the tower. We took part in a special presentation at the ‘Tower of London’ to celebrate the Queen’s Jubliee and the wonderful growing projects all the schools around the country have completed. 

Another highlight of our trip was the sight seeing of important London landmarks including the ‘London Eye’ and going through the dark tunnels during our journey. 

What a beautiful week we have had. We made good use of the lovely weather and spent a morning in the forest. We had fun staying in the track lines on the field and ran some relay races. whilst in the forest, we used some soapy water to try to trick some worms into believing it was raining just like in our story, Yucky Worms, by Vivian French. We had prepared a wormery in our classroom and so we needed to add some worms.

On Wednesday, for our PE session, the sun was shining again so we headed back out to the field and had lots of fun.

We watched a video to show how worms move and tried to demonstrate that using

Play-Doh worms that we had made. We then used an app called ‘Stop Motion’ to make our animations of a moving worm. Click below to see a few examples of what the children were able to produce with very little adult input.

Our cooking this week was to use our senses to explore several of our classroom herbs and some other edible salad leaves. The children smelled, tasted and felt the different leaves and chose those they wanted to use for their salad.

Butterflies have been excited to see our caterpillars become cocoons over the duration of this week. The last caterpillar crawled to the top of the container just this afternoon. We should be able to transfer them into the butterfly net on Monday.

Sadly, our ants didn’t make it.

Also this week, we played some maths games, building our thinking skills and reviewing the concept of subtraction. We created butterfly life cycles using pasta shapes and Busy Things. We made paper folded caterpillars that we could make move by blowing through straws, trying to investigate where best to point the air and which paper worked best.

Thank you for the many donations of bottles and chocolate.

Congratulations to our star this week.

Enjoy the weekend.

Take care,

Paula

What a scorcher! Well done Butterflies for staying cool and calm.

To all dads, have a good day on Sunday. If you want a surprise and don’t want to see what the children have prepared for you, come back later on Sunday. 😉

We began the week revisiting the story, ‘I Am A Bee’ and thinking about what we had learned about the work that bees do. To explore the idea of pollination further, we enjoyed a fun activity. We cut out some pretty flowers to attract the bees. We stuck them to paper bags. We then all made a bee finger puppet. After adding cheese puffs to the paper bags, everyone took their bee puppets to collect pollen from all the flowers. Taking some cheese puffs from each bag, we found that we had collected a lot of cheese puff pollen!

Swimming was great fun. It was our last session of the year so we had balls and squirty pipes and made sure we had a wonderful time.

All classes have been making flowers to make a wonderful Superbloom display. We did a little gardening too.

Our caterpillars have arrived and are growing fast. We enjoyed listening to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

We practised our cutting skills, slicing cucumber and tomato to make a caterpillar. We threaded grapes and used chocolate chips for the eyes.

For Father’s Day, we made fries which had some exciting words to describe our dads.

We designed and decorated our own ties and added some treats.

Throughout the week, we have been observing our ants. They have survived and we even had some more eggs, which is most promising.They are travelling up and down to the feeding pod but haven’t made much use of the soil nest as yet. We have left them with honey water and grapes for the weekend. Let’s hope they settle more while the classroom is peaceful.

Next week, we will be looking for worms and learning more about them.

Congratulations to this week’s superstar.

Have a great weekend.

Paula

It was wonderful to see everyone back in school after the holiday. The children were all so bright, cheerful and enthusiastic, which was lovely.

It has been a short week but a fun and busy 3 days. Our learning about and celebrating the Platinum Jubilee has continued.
We made and filled our own scones. They weren’t our greatest success but we enjoyed making them. It is all about the journey rather than the destination of course!

We also made jam and cucumber sandwiches and decorated our own cupcakes. 🧁

Everyone made a beautiful crown which we wore to our Royal tea. We wrote our menus in handwriting this week.

In music, we listened to some marching bands, including of course, those seen during the Trooping of the Colour. We used our chop stick drumming sticks and marched around the room having a lovely time.

As part of our Plants and Insects topic, we are setting up an ant farm. It is not as simple as I first thought and apparently the colony need queen if they are to thrive. To stand the best chance, ordered some live ants. A queen, several workers and some eggs. We are leaving them to relax and destress over the weekend and hopefully there will then be enough workers to care for the queen once we attempt to transfer them to the nest.
we did however take a quick peek at what had arrived. Hopefully, next week, i will have some positive news to share regarding the ants. 🐜🦟

Our caterpillars are due to arrive in the next few days too!🐛

Last but certainly not least, congratulations to our King Superstar this week.

Enjoy the weekend.

Paula

And just like that, it is half term already.

I will begin by wishing everyone a wonderful, safe and happy holiday.

Butterflies have begun their Jubilee celebrations but they will continue after the break.

After learning a little about the Queen and why we will be celebrating this week, we created Union Jack flags, coloured corgis and enjoyed other red, white and blue tasks.

To finish the week, we enjoyed an afternoon tea with scones, jam and cream and cucumber sandwiches, with the crusts cut off of course. This was superb for our self help skills. It also reinforced some basic 2D and 3D shape recognition. We identified rectangular slices of bread, from a cuboid loaf, circles of cucumber, cut from a cylinder and then we endeavoured to cut our sandwiches into small squares and triangles.

We have enjoyed a story about a little girl called Katie who goes to London to see all the famous landmarks. We found images of all the places Katie visited and compared them to the illustrations. The children had a lovely afternoon with Kelvin, using lego to build some of the landmarks with lego.

I will share a link for the video version below. There is a lovely video of a real life Katie who went to London to visit all the places depicted in the book. The children really enjoyed it so I will drop that below too.

A big thank you to the PSA for the really lovely Jubilee teddies. The children love them. Look at their smiles on the photos below.

Please enjoy some photos of our week.

Congratulations to his week’s Star.

Happy holidays.

Paula

This week we have learned a lot more about bees. We made origami bees and have studied the life cycle of bees. We cooked with honey again this week. We chose to make Honey and Orange jelly sweets, a vegetarian batch and a normal batch. The children saw how our mixture changed from liquid to solid.

Our sunflowers are still growing at an impressive rate. We noticed how they, and our edible leaves are growing towards the windows. We turned them around and observed how they turned back towards the light. Jo Bell brought in some dried sunflower heads for us to look closely at the seeds.

Thank you for sending in your 50th Birthday cards. It’s not too late if you haven’t sent it in yet.

Join us next week to see how we are getting ready for Jubilee celebrations. 👑

Congratulations to this week’s Superstar.

Hope everyone is enjoying the sunshine.

Paula

Butterflies continue to grow in so many ways. Each week they show greater confidence and maturity. We are so proud of them all. Our plants are doing well too.

Look how they have grown since last week.

We will be recording their growth over the next 2 weeks. Continuing with the theme of Sunflowers, we have looked at Van Gogh’s famous painting and have begun to create our own versions on the computer.

This week, we were super excited to be able to go swimming again. Everyone had a load of fun and we marvelled at how the children’s skills have developed.

Our number focus has been subtraction. We have had a lot of fun with that too.

We read a story about the life of a bee, ’I Am a Bee’ by Rebecca and James McDonald. Next week we will be learning about the life cycle of bees and how they help us. We are going to have some fun finding out about pollination and why we need to take care of these special creatures. In cooking we used honey to make honey Joys.

We have 2 new relaxing and calming down activities that are proving very popular. I promised to share them with you here. You might enjoy them too.

Last but not least at all, congratulations to this weeks Superstar.

Wishing you all a super weekend. I am hoping for some sun tomorrow. 🤞🏼🌞

Enjoy!
Paula

It has been a short but busy and action packed week in Butterflies. We learned about the meaning of Ramadan and Eid-ul-Fitr through a story of a little girl who learns about giving and helping others. We completed Eid activities on Busy Things, creating Eid lanterns, plates of delicious looking Eid treats and creating henna tattoos. We tasted dates and made our own sweet fruit balls with cherries, dates, apricots and sesame seeds.

A special treat for us was a visit by the lovely Maryam from Caterpillars class. She showed us some Islamic artefacts and talked about how she celebrates with her family.

Everyone was amazed to hear one of our Butterflies recite verses from the Qu’ran and educate us on how to use a prayer mat.

Butterflies have also enjoyed watching their sunflowers grow, quite literally by the day. We have been recording the changes in our Sunflower diaries. We have planted some edible plants which we hope to harvest in the coming weeks. This week also saw us begin to help our friends in Rushall in the school garden areas. It was so nice to see the children enjoying themselves together and making new friends.

Here are a few photos of us in PE incorporating rolls and balances into a new routine.

Finally, congratulations to our Superstar of the week.

Have a lovely weekend. Stay safe and happy.

Paula

We have begun our exciting new topic, ‘Insects and Plants’. This week we have looked at the life cycle of sunflowers through the story, Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown. We made beautiful sunflowers for our wall display with paper plates and bubble wrap for the seeds. The children were excited to plant sunflower seeds and are excited to see how they grow.

Eid Mubarak to everyone. We are looking forward to learning about Eid and the celebrations throughout next week but we will also continue with our sunflower crafts. With a little luck we will soon be able to monitor the progress of our plants and measure their growth. We will be planting beans soon too.

We have also been able to see how much our wildflower seeds have come on over the Easter holidays and have been watering them. We will begin planting them outside in the garden next week with our friends in Rushall and in Gardening Club which begins 9th May.

It was a huge disappointment not to be able to go swimming this week. Let’s hope it will be repaired very soon.

Congratulations to our Superstar this week.

Enjoy the bank holiday and Eid festivities.

Stay safe.

Paula