Lovely to see the children back in school after the Easter holidays.

We had a very nature inspired week this week.

The children helped Mrs. Johnson to tidy up the mud kitchen and garden. They planted herbs in our pallet planter and made a bamboo teepee den for sweet peas to grow up.

Our new project is "How does it grow?" and we began with the lifecycle of a frog. We went pond dipping and the children learnt how how to safely balance on one knee so that they could lean forward and not fall in. Everyone was exceptionally sensible and safe, following all of the pond rules. We were originally looking for tadpoles but the newts have probably eaten them.

We found newts, mayfly nymph, dragonfly nymph, water boatmen, pond skaters and beetle larvae. We brought a tray back to class to look closely at the creatures under the visualiser and then used an identification chart to identify them.

The children understood the life cycle frogspawn, tadpole, froglet and newt. They also understood the food chain leaf eaten by tadpole, eaten by newt, eaten by hedgehog/cat/fox.

We also took delivery of some caterpillars and the children helped Mrs. Bertacchini to move them from the group pot into individual pots with special caterpillar food. They were teeny tiny and the children are excited to see them grow and change.