On behalf of all the ladybird team I would like to express what a wonderful year we have had with our fantastic ladybird children and families. Thank you all for your ongoing support, the children have all made amazing progress and we are so so very proud!🤩
We have had a great final week of summer term, with lots of fun and celebrations together, the children have shown lovely communication and interaction too 🤩.
Collecting natural resources to make paint brushes, for our large outside art attack with paint.
Fantastic fine motor skills everyone 😍👏
Water play fun 🤩 💦
Pass the parcel , party fun and present time 🐞😍🤩❤️
Thank you so much to those of you who were able to join us. Ladybirds were amazing! They coped so well with all the changes in the day and the behaviour of all the children was superb. Even the weather was well behaved! What a fun day. Thanks also to everyone involved in organising and ensuring the smooth running of the day.
You will have seen last week how our caterpillars had finally become butterflies. Here we are sequencing pictures based on our observations over the last few weeks and helping to bring our story to life.
We have also been bringing our growing to a fitting end. This week we harvested our salad leaves and cress and made sandwiches with our produce. We added some cucumber to add a little extra and to further develop our cutting skills.
Happy weekend everyone.
We really are looking forward to our last week as lovely Ladybirds. Take care,
The children continue to practice their hand and eye coordination, alongside agility and balance during our physical well being sessions. We encourage the children to be independent, become more aware of the space around them, be aware of potential dangers and build confidence in their abilities. We are so proud of how the children have been working together on the apparatus, waiting for others and being aware of others close by. We transfer these skills into our outside playground and forest school , enabling the children to be more confident to explore new balance and climbing opportunities.
Back in the classroom we have been busy too. A fabulous highlight has been seeing our butterflies emerge. After a few days we were able to set them free. We celebrated by making butterfly cup cakes. Take a look below. Also below, you can see some photos of our music session this week and us having fun using apples to print caterpillars and butterflies.
Take care and enjoy a relaxing weekend. Love from Paula, Lisa and the Ladybird Team.
To update you further, when we arrived in class on Monday, we discovered that our caterpillars had become cocoons. We left them to harden off a little before placing them into the net. Exciting times!
Our salad produce continues to grow but the beans are making excellent progress. We enjoy watering them every few days.
We are still enjoying our Hungry Caterpillar story and story song. We are trying hard to sign all the foods that the hungry caterpillar ate in the story. See the Singing Hands version of the story below if you would like to try at home too.
Please enjoy the photographs below. You will also find a few other collages of some of our other fabulous moments this week. In PE, we were climbing and jumping. Each of us made great efforts at our own level and we all grew a little in confidence. We completed some story related activities supporting our fine motor skills and problem solving development. We also started to look at families and family members. We started with the ever popular Peppa Pig and family. Next week we are going to be looking at our own families and loved ones. Thank you so much to everyone who sent in the gorgeous photos for us to use. The children will love seeing those and sharing them with us.
Happy weekend everyone,
Love from Paula, Lisa and the ladybird team. 🐞🐞
Learning about family members Climbing and jumping in PE. Story related activities
Here is an update for you on our class caterpillars and our recent plantings. We are amazed at how the caterpillars have grown. They won’t be caterpillars for much longer. Have a look at the photos to see how big they are now. Our seeds are germinating and showing progress too, just like our Ladybirds.It is fun to observe the changes happening. It looks like we are going to have a hot week. Stay safe everyone.
What a fabulous start to our summer term, the children have settled back into our school routines and we are all enjoying the new experiences so far. Our new focus story is “The Very Hungry Caterpillar 🐛 “ the children are engaging well with this text and we are using this story and characters through all areas of the curriculum. The children used their senses to explore different leaves and foliage, some children liked to smell the fresh mint, others had a little taste , we pulled the different leaves, using touch to feel different textures. We then used large paper, glue and leaves to create our own little or big caterpillars. Some children were able to use scissors to cut the leaves that they wanted to use .
We have loved getting back into forest school, the children showed increased confidence and independence when exploring this week. We played hide and seek with our caterpillar and butterfly. The children were very good at finding the characters, some liked to hide them again. We had fantastic problem solving with children asking for help if they couldn’t reach or moving natural resources to use as stepping stones.
We explored the long grass, used large twigs as walking sticks, moved in and out of the dark forest to the field. We even found a little black bird that was struggling to fly, some great looking and intrigue with our natural world. We are so very proud of you all 🤩🐞
We have also been busy planting. We are really excited to see what grows. We have planted different salad leaves and broad beans. Everyone is excited to see how they grow.
As well as observing how are seeds are getting on, we are going to be carefully watching to see what happens to our baby caterpillars. They are very tiny at the moment.
Everyone hopes we have lots to show you over the next few weeks. Be sure to keep checking. Finally, we wish all dads and carers a very happy Father’s Day. Thank you for all you do for our little Ladybirds. We hope you like our little gifts.
Have a fabulous weekend. Love from Lisa, Paula and the Ladybirds 🐞
What a fabulous end to another great half term in ladybird class. The children continue to show some amazing progress with listening, attention and concentration, turn taking and communication. Our numeracy day was wonderful the children explored many maths related resources during continuous provision. Colour matching and sorting, hidden shapes in flour, shape puzzles, large and small numicon with great sequencing and counting as a group, dice to explore , different textured numbers to feel, musical instruments and number songs. The children engaged well with all the activities, we focused on shape during our physical well being session, making shapes out of our bodies and going on a shape hunt. We are so proud of you ladybirds 🐞🤩👏
To finish off our fabulous week, we enjoyed some sand art. We were learning about colours and refining our fine motor skills through glue spreading , pinching sand in our fingers and sprinkling it over our glue patterns. Then we used a spoon to scoop up sand and pour it into jars creating some lovely patterns. The children selected the colours of their choices through eye gazing, pointing , signing and verbalising. Well done Ladybirds.
Have a wonderful half term break. Hope the sun shines on everyone.
What a fabulous week we have had in ladybird group this week 🤩🐞👏. Our highlight was definitely sharing our physical well being session with our wonderful families. We are so very proud of all the children for the engagement and movement during our sports showcase. The children were happy to share these moments with their families and all children coped amazingly well with having so many new faces to join us. We focussed on moving ‘under’ and ‘ over’ our bear hunt obstacle course. We used our familiar story song to motivate the children and modelled moving through the different areas. The children enjoyed going over the high equipment and under our forest materials, we went through our swishy swashy grass and into the dark cave. The children clearly know the key parts of the story, showing lots of expression and enthusiasm, lots of children were in the moment and acting out running from the bear. We finished our fantastic session with parachute games, silly to calm yoga and relaxation with bubbles and lights. A massive thank you to all our ladybird parents for joining us.
We made the most of the beautiful weather again this week. One of the highlights was building sand castles, scooping and pouring sand. It was wonderful to see the children working side by side happily, sharing resources and taking turns, observing each other. We were joined by our Caterpillar friends too and everyone had a lovely time. During bucket time we created some large bubbles which the children loved. We took the activity outside for more fun later. This was a wonderful turn taking activity. Once again we were impressed with the tolerance and engagement shown by the children.
We hope that you are making the most of your weekend in the sunshine.
What a wonderful week ladybirds, the children have really enjoyed spending lots of time outside. We have engaged with routine parts of the day, snack times, reading, sensory play and lots of physical activities outdoors this week. Some fantastic levels of concentration, working together, encouraging sharing and turn taking and communication. We have also explored different natural resources , touching, looking, smelling and tasting mint leaves. We worked in groups to create a big forest art attack. The children were encouraged to pick items and stick them to the group paper. We recalled key parts of our story song ‘we are going on a bear hunt’ , using pictures, words and the book to motivate the children to join in. Lots of children had great concentration , pointing at pictures and adding bears into our forest art. WELL DONE 👏🐞😍
Our bear theme has also continued. This week our learning has included, threading and tracing to develop our fine motor skills and pencil grips, counting and matching bears to caves, sequencing scenes to follow and retell the story.
Ladybirds have had another fabulous week, we have focussed on plants and flowers. We have used our senses to explore, encouraging the children to touch, smell and look at the key features of a flower. We dismantled tulips, counting petals, looking at the different colours and sticking them to make creations. Some children were able to match the stem, leaf and petals to picture symbols and others enjoyed exploring the different textures.
We have also been on a flower hunt in our small field at school, we enjoyed recalling our “Going on a bear hunt story” moving through the long swishy swashy grass. We encouraged the children to collect daisies, dandelions and other natural resources, ready to make flower art work. The children loved exploring a new area of school, we even spotted a special insect and extra member to our class ‘ a little ladybird 🐞’. The children gathered to look and touch the ladybird, fantastic engagement 🤩.
We used flowers to sort and classify in Mathematics . We sorted first by colour and then by size. It was lovely to see the children looking and thinking carefully. Superb engagement once again.
To end a fabulous week of learning and to continue asking the most of any sunshine, we enjoyed a teddy bears picnic. We used our spreading and cutting skills to make our own jam sandwiches.
We are of course looking forward to more sunny days to take some of our learning outside. Fingers crossed the sun shines on us for a wonderful bank holiday weekend.
