Colour and Pattern - Elmer
A parade of patchwork elephants exploded into the Bears class to make it bright, colourful and elephant themed.
On small world we set an Elmer scene for the children to create adventures for Elmer, the other elephants and the jungle animals.
We created 3D puffy Elmers with a lot of patient painting of different coloured squares, screwing up newspaper to stuff Elmer, and finally joining Elmer with staples. Some of the Bears thought they might use it as a pillow - not to be recommended. We covered milk bottles with small squares of coloured tissue to create a patchwork Elmer, and added patchwork ears, googly eyes and a wool tassel tail.
The Bears faced a big challenge to create a 3D multilink Elmer. We are learning to be resilient and in our Jigsaw PSHE lessons we discuss how keeping going, trying something a different way, or asking for help can help us overcome a challenge. We also created coloured repeating patterns with elephants, built Elmer jigsaws and a large Elmer floor puzzle with coloured squares and triangles.
In the writing area, we coloured pen control patterned elephants, and wrote a description of the patterns and colours we could see. We created a pattern wordbank and used our colour wordbank from Rainbow Fish to help us write the descriptive sentences. We labelled the parts of an elephant, using our phonics knowledge to complete the phoneme frames. Finally, we wrote sentences about one of our Elmer creations. We have been working hard on our letter formation in our handwriting sessions, and we are encouraging the children to use a full stop at the end of their sentences.
On the maths table, we engaged with the purpose of counting, ordinality (the sequence of numbers) and explored cardinality by focusing on the 'stopping number'. In our second Elmer week, we used our subitising skills (seeing quantity without counting) in more difficult arrangements. We moved from dots in a line to a focus on standard dice arrangements. We are beginning to see sub-groups within larger numbers.
In the practical area, we used a ruler and coloured pencils to draw vertical and horizontal lines on an elephant outline. We modelled playdough, and used rollers, cutters and tools to create an elephant scene. We looked at photos of elephants and tried to recreate the wrinkly patterns of an elephant's skin. To celebrate Elmer's Day, we decorated the playdough elephants with bright collage materials. The Bears love cooking, and were so pleased to bake and decorate Elmer shaped biscuits. I'm sure they were just as happy to eat them!
In the Elmer's Walk story, Elmer takes his time to appreciate the world around him. Inspired by Elmer to notice, the Bears took a walk around school in their colour teams, to look for things that match each of Elmer's colours.
In PE, we are dancing on Wednesday mornings and travelling in gymnastics on Thursday afternoons. I hope you enjoyed our wonderful dancers in the Mr Jelly and Mr Strong video that I shared on Tapestry.
Next, a visit from underwear stealing aliens!