Traditional Tales - Goldilocks and the Three Bears

No Big Bad Wolf in our next traditional tale, instead we have a golden haired girl on the rampage, breaking furniture and eating other people's food. Enter Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Our role-play area transformed into Three Bears cottage. Then one morning, our Bears arrived to school to discover the Bears gone, a broken chair, the porridge had been eaten, flowers were tipped over, and kitchen utensils were everywhere. Our cottage was really quite a mess! When we recovered from the shock, we set about investigating who could have possibly done such a thing. We all agreed it must have been Goldilocks.

Together we retold the traditional tale to create a class story map. Then on our writing table, we sequenced the pictures and annotated a story map with vocabulary from the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story. 

We made and tasted porridge, choosing from a selection of toppings, and wrote about our porridge tasting in our coloured porridge bowl outlines. Some of us loved the porridge so had a second serving, but one or two thought it was not right at all!  We picked our favourite topping and created a class pictogram to show which topping we liked best.

On the creative table, we painted bright, beautiful three Bears cottages, and created Goldilocks and Bears puppets with paint and collage. We used our puppets to retell the story in groups. 

On our practical table, we made playdough story characters with cutters, tools, and collage materials and larger loose part bears with the natural resources. We cut and fixed together split pin Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It is quite a challenge to not lose a body part. We explored capacity with porridge oats and sorted everyday objects into groups of hard and soft materials. 

In our first week of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, our maths engaged with activities to find out 'how many' objects there are, and revisited cardinality (the idea that the last number tells us how many things there are altogether). A key focus was to consolidate our understanding of the 'stable order principle' - rehearsing the order of numbers to 10, and understanding that the order of numbers will not change. The children were also given opportunities to practise counting beyond 20.

The following week, our activities focused on our further development of comparison. When comparing, the children noticed attributes and were developing their understanding of the differences and similarities between them. They were encouraged to focus on ordinality by considering where numbers are in relation to each other.

We thought we might replace the broken furniture, so used our construction materials to make chairs, tables and beds for the Bears. We also used junk modelling materials to build a chair for Baby Bear. Then we tested our model to check it was big enough and strong enough to support him. 

Feeling quite fed up with the naughtiness of Goldilocks, we designed and built a trap to stop her. We had to think about what we would need and how it would work. This worked well when the trap was laid on the carpet, but some of us needed to make some alterations because when we picked up our trap to show how it would work, Goldilocks fell right out and that just wouldn't do.

Finally, we thought about and voted for which character had made bad choices in the story. 

Next week, the Big Bad Wolf returns.