This week in literacy, we have been focusing on speech within a story. The children have been learning that different characters say different things throughout the story, depending on who they are and if they are goodies or baddies.

We retold Jack and the Beanstalk using props and then wrote speech bubbles for the various characters as we went. The children were really great at not only remembering the speech within the story, such as Fee, fie, foe, fum! but also making suggestions about other things the character might say. Then in smaller groups, the children wrote their own speech bubbles and drew a character to accompany it. 

In maths, this week the children have been learning all about measuring length and found a rather exciting note in the classroom on Tuesday morning! 

 

Fee, fie, foe fun!

There is a lot of measuring to be done!

Can you find out how long my footprint is? 

Can you find things that are longer or shorter than my footprint?

From the Giant x

 

The children found some large footprints on the carpet and used their knowledge of measuring height from last week to help them find the length of the footprints. We measured the footprints using cubes and also started to learn about how to use cm’s. The children enjoyed estimating how many cubes long the footprint might be and seeing who was closest! The children then explored measuring their own footprint by using cubes to find the length of their shoes. We made a class bar chart to show each person's shoe length and compared them to one another.

 

The children measured objects using cubes or a ruler and remembered that they needed to make sure their cubes were an equal length to the object or to start from the zero on the ruler. They then record the length of each of these objects. Later in the week, the children explored making different length wiggly worms using playdough. The children were challenged to make worms of different lengths and then to measure them using a ruler or cubes. This was a fun activity to consolidate their learning on measuring length and they are all very confident, using the correct vocabulary to compare.

Although we did not have any magic beans (that we know of!) we thought we might plant some runner beans of our own. The children were confident that the beans would need soil, water and sunshine to grow. We discussed the conditions the beans would need and read the story The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle to learn more about this and how seeds can be transported from place to place by the wind or animals. 

The children carefully filled their cup with soil, planted their bean and gave it a little water. They also created their own fairytale castles made from card and secured these to kebab sticks for their bean to climb towards. The children were interested to watch a time lapse video of a plant growing to see clearly the stages of this process. We will be looking after our beans as the weeks go on and watching carefully for any changes. The specific type of runner beans the children planted are called Black Night, which we thought linked well to our topic. If they manage to produce pods, these pods will be black with purple beans!

 

The children have been using their imaginations a lot this week and we pretend that if their beanstalk grew up into the clouds, what kind of land would they like to find? The children suggested a chocolate biscuit land, a unicorn land, a dinosaur land and even a Mario Land! We used Google to find some pictures that might be similar to their ideas and then asked ChatGPT to generate some of their suggestions. The children then drew their ideas on large A3 pieces of paper.  

Form 1 have also created their own magic beans this week. Using glitter, paint, tissue paper, feathers (and anything else they could think!) they decorated their beans. We then had a discussion about what they would like their magic bean to do if it was planted… What might happen?! Some children said their bean would grow a rainbow, some said it would grow chocolate coins and some said it would grow up into the clouds, just like the one in Jack and the Beanstalk. 

The children also had great fun at the drama workshop, pretending to be all sorts of different toys that come to life. They listened well to the drama teacher and enjoyed taking part along with Nursery and Transition class.

Another fairy-tale-filled week in Form 1!