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.

This afternoon we had great fun flipping and eating pancakes with Squirrel class.

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

Counting the spiders legs.

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

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.

World Book Day 2023.
Thank you to all the grown ups that helped the children look so great,
We are looking forward to story time with the year 3 children and a parade with the rest of the school this afternoon.

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.

The children made Hungry caterpillars by using the letters to write out their names.

The children very carefully cut their own fruit today to make their fruit salad butterfly’s.

We enjoyed doing some story sequencing, The Hungry Caterpillar is definitely a preschool favourite.

Week 4: This week the children have been talking about the lifecycle of a plant and today we have made pictures of all the different parts of a plant.
 

The children enjoyed talking about what plants need to grow. We planted cress seeds and talked about what they need to do to make them grow

The children have been sending in photos from home of their cress growing and some of them have even tasted it..

Week 6: This week we have looked at the story of Easter. Easter is the greatest celebration in the Catholic faith because it is the completion of the Holy Week that ends with the resurrection of Jesus.

The children started today with an Easter Egg Hunt but with an added challenge all the eggs had the children’s names written on them, so they had to recognise their name to find their eggs and they each had to find five each. Once they had five eggs on their jumper they could collect their prize.

We all enjoyed our indoor picnic and Squirrel class came to join us. Followed by our Easter hat parade.
What fabulous creation’s the children came in with, thank you to all the grown ups that helped the children make their beautiful hats.

Another amazing term in Hedgehog class, the children as always have made us teachers very proud with their passion and enthusiasm for learning and excellent behaviour which is always commented on throughout the school.

We have done lots of exploring and had lots of fun. We hope you all have a well deserved rest and enjoy the next two weeks with family and friends and we look forward to seeing you all week commencing the 17th April for the start of the Summer Term.