Traditional Tales - The Three Little Pigs

The topic for the first half of the Spring term was Traditional Tales. We found out that a traditional tale is an old story people had shared by telling each other, so there are different versions of the stories with many details the same such as the characters, but also differences. We collected together all the traditional tales we could find in our class book box to enjoy sharing with each other. Our first tale was 'The Three Little Pigs'.

       After reading and watching some versions of the story we knew the features that were the same in the story and worked as a class to create a story mountain. This helped us to sequence the events in the story and to retell it.

            

 We set up our small world area with the straw, sticks and brick house and had 3 Little Pigs and a Wolf made for us by Miss Ellana! The pigs were very cute and the wolf didn't really look that big or bad as he had a smiley face! We loved playing with them to retell the story. He might not be a big bad wolf, but he is cheeky - just look at him trying to get down the chimney!

   

   

We made paper plate pig masks and added a snout, eyes, ears and a mouth.

We practised saying phrases the pigs said in the stories we had looked at.

      

We wrote our own versions of The Three Little Pigs and were videoed reading our books!

        

 

We found out that you can make pink paint by mixing red and white and loved mixing up our own colours to paint pigs. Squeezing the paint bottles was the best bit!

     

   

 

 

We didn't have any pink playdough, so we told Mrs Smith we could make it by mixing red and white just like the paint. Unfortunately it was much harder work than mixing the paint and it took Mrs Smith a while! Once it was made we used it to create pig faces.........

         

 

.....and also 3d pigs which stood up (when they wanted to!). It was fiddly adding the cotton bud legs and even trickier to get them to balance, but we kept trying!

             

   

 

 

Our role play corner became a construction site where we could practise our construction skills! There were hard hats and hi-vis jackets which we had to wear before we went into the construction site. When we had our safety gear on we could build with foam bricks or wooden blocks and could use the tools and wheelbarrow. We were very busy as you can see!

        

After watching a video on bricklaying, we had a try for ourselves - not with bricks and cement but Jenga blocks and shaving foam! We used plastic palette knives to scoop a layer of foam to place our first layer of bricks, then kept adding layers. It was so much fun and we were brilliant bricklayers!

      

We also used large scale construction materials outside and worked with a partner to create these walls. Great teamwork Antelopes!

Some of us even managed to use real brick patterns to make our walls stronger.

      

As well as large scale construction materials, we used our class construction materials to build houses for the pigs. Our criteria for building houses was that it had to be large enough for a pig to fit inside and it needed walls and preferably a roof to keep the pig safe from the Big Bad Wolf!

We used Magnetic Polydron, Sticklebricks, wooden bricks, Mega Blocks and Clixi.

         

                        

As we were such expert builders we had a try at building our own 'straw' (paper drinking straws) and 'stick' (plastic sticks) houses and used masking tape and playdough to join them together. Again this was a tricky job which needed lots of patience and resilience and we had to kept trying new ideas when things went wrong.

Look at what we created after a lot of time and effort!

         

 

For our final construction challenge we used cocktail sticks and mini marshmallows to create structures around a pig.

We have been really imaginative with our construction in this topic!

      

 

In maths we played a Three Little Pigs track game. We used our subitising skills when we rolled the dice to see how many moves we needed to make and collected parts of our houses as we moved around.

We also matched numbered pigs to houses with dot patterns on the doors. 

      

            

Here we counted how many pigs were on the field and how many were on the mud, found the number on the number fans, then counted them altogether and found the total on the number line.