6th January 2020

Our new topic for this term is Garden Birds and we started the week off with a visit from Mrs Taylor's pet chickens to help us to understand what makes a bird a bird! The children loved meeting Rusty and Fudge and learned lots about feathers, wings, beaks and claws. 

January 2020

The children have been working hard to develop their observational drawing skills over the past few weeks. Look at this amazing magpie drawing by one of them - such lovely detail and a great use of the space on the page. Well done Hedgehogs.

January 2020

We have been looking at the traditional rhyme - One For Sorrow, as part of our magpie studies. We decided that it was a bit sad so the children wanted to personalise it. This was a particularly moving example from one of the Hedgehogs - hoping for 'no more war' and 'happiness'. What a caring and thoughtful class we are.

January 2020

What an exciting time the Hedgehogs had today! We used lots of different skills to make some hanging fruit bird feeders in our continued attempts to help our garden birds at this time of year - when food is short.

Comparing dried and fresh fruit
The first step in our creation was to compare fresh with dried apple and grapes with raisins. We talked at length about how they look and feel and what the children think had to happen in order for the fruits to be changed into their dried versions. Many of the children agreed that the juice of the fruit seems to be gone and they feel stickier and rubbery.

Learning how to safely use a needle
After talking about the fruits, the children listened closely to instructions about using sewing needles safely. The needles were large and blunted but we still encouraged the same safety measures as if they were a sharp needle. 

Creating a fruit pattern
After learning how to use a needle safely the children all used them very safely to thread fruit onto a length of wool in order to create a repeating pattern of fruit. All of the children were successful at creating a repeating pattern.

Choosing a hanging position
After an adult removed their needle and tied the ends of the wool, the children then walked around the grounds choosing what they believed to be a great hanging position. Most of the children were really excited that their fruit hanger would be seen by their mummies and daddies at home time. 

Checking the hangers
Later in the day we went for a walk, to spot birds, and noticed that some of our hangers had already started to be eaten by the birds! The children noticed that their repeating patterns no longer repeated because parts were missing and were really excited about this.