Come Outside - Jasper's Beanstalk

Our story for our beans focus has been 'Jasper's Beanstalk' by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen where Jasper the cat finds and plants a bean, but after a week he gets bored of waiting for it to grow and digs it up again!

 

 

We retold the story on the small world area and in our writing we wrote a sentence for each day of the story.

We also pretended to plant beans, sieved for seeds in soil and used some small garden tools just like Jasper.

We learnt the names of tools and used our phonic skills to read labels to match them to photographs and then made models of some tools with Sticklebricks.

Can you guess what they are?

We used Mobilo to make lawnmowers and put our models on fake grass with our mini me blocks so we could do the mowing!

We also made Mobilo wheelbarrows and had to use a piece of paper to line the model so we could fill it with beans!

We also built plant pots for beanstalks from Clixi.

 

In role play we set up a garden centre to buy and sell gardening things.

We explored beans in fine motor activities too........

    

.......and even tasted different sorts of beans. Can you guess from our faces which ones we liked and which ones we didn't?

 

We had painted our own winding beanstalks, then when we were doing PE outside, we pretended to be climbing up a beanstalk, and had our photos taken. Once we had cut these out and glued them onto our paintings, it looked as if we were climbing the beanstalk!

In 'Jasper's Beanstalk'. Jasper had been reading 'Jack and the Beanstalk'. After we listened to this story, we wondered what we might see at the top of a magic beanstalk. We had some really imaginative ideas and painted pictures and wrote about our them.

Do you like our surprised faces in these pictures?

 

In maths we have been ordering numbered leaves up a beanstalk.........

........and comparing heights of beanstalks. First we made a tower of bricks the same height as a beanstalk, then made two more - one shorter and one taller. 

 

We used pastels, paint and collage to make leaves for a beanstalk.......

.....and this is what grew in our classroom!

 

Just like Jasper, we wanted to grow beanstalks. Mrs Martin helped us start off our beans on damp cotton wool in a jar with cling film over the top. We put them on our sunny windowsill, 

 

Afterwards we sequenced pictures to show the order of what we did, then we wrote a sentence for each picture. We tried to explain clearly so someone else could follow our instructions and plant a bean of their own!

We are watching closely to see what is happening as well as drawing pictures and taking photographs, and are recording their progress in our bean diaries.

 

They have already grown so much after around a week in their jar greenhouses! 

We can't wait to see how tall they will grow - maybe they really will grow up to the clouds!