This term we will be exploring the outside world and looking for mini beasts in our preschool gardens and around the school grounds. They will learn and compare the living environments, of many mini beasts and how to recognise them in the great outdoors. The children’s understanding of the world will be amplified as they take the journey through the different life stages of living things. They will learn about different life cycles and transitions in the lives of the various living things that they will be looking at in this term.

Week 1: The children have started learning about minibeasts and this week we are looking at Ladybirds, Bumble bees and Dragonflies. We have been discussing how we can recognise them and where we might see them outside.

We are enjoying reading What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson

The children have been enjoying a bug hunt in our preschool garden.

Tomorrow is the start of Lent and the children have been talking about what this means and the reason why we have pancake day as people used to eat all their rich foods before Lent started on Ash Wednesday.

 

We talked about how Bees live in hives and make honey. The children enjoyed honey on pitta bread at snack time. 

The children made beautiful dragonflys with lots of sparkles.

Week 2: This week we have continued our mini beast adventures and have been talking about Spiders, Snails Worms and Ants.

The children threaded our own spider webs, it was tricky but they did really well.

The children painted their hands to make the spiders.

We have been using clay to make mini-beast fossils, it was a great activity to support the development of the children’s fine motor skills when using the tweezers to pick up their chosen minibeast and gross motor skills when manipulating and molding the clay into shape.

All of the children in Hedgehog class love books, and today they enjoyed having the year 3 children come in and read to them.

Week 3: For the next three weeks the children will be looking at lifecycles and we have started this week with the lifecycle of a caterpillar.
We are enjoying reading the The Very Hungry caterpillar 🐛 and will be doing lots of activities to help the children learn how such a small mini beast can change into a beautiful butterfly.

Today we are story sequencing The very Hungry Caterpillar, helping the children to tell the story themselves. A great activity to support their communication and language development.

The children have made their own caterpillars from egg boxes and painted them.