It is the second half of our Spring term, and we have a new Traditional Tales topic. Our first traditional tale is the story of The Three Little Pigs. We discussed how a traditional tale is usually an old story that has been passed down for many years. There can be different versions, but usually some details remain the same, and there are often good and bad characters in the tales. The clear story structures, strong characters and repetitive language in traditional tales are great for building oral storytelling to develop our writing.

Our Bears’ classroom was filled with pink — from painted paper-plate pig masks and free paintings of pink pigs to curly pink pigtails and playdough pigs with cotton-bud legs.

We listened to many different versions of the Three Little Pigs story, and while some of us thought the Three Pigs were good characters in the tale, most Bears believed the wolf was misunderstood, and actually it was only a sneeze! 

We drew then painted some wonderfully detailed wolves. Outside, we painted a large grey wolf on a tuff tray with runny paint, a straw and huff and puff.

On the writing table, we completed the phoneme frames to create a 3 little pigs story word bank. Then we read sentences, matched the sentences to pictures, and ordered the sentences to tell the story. We have written our own Three Little Pigs mini-book by drawing and colouring pictures on each page, then writing a sentence for each illustration to tell the story.

Lots of house building – paint and collage straw, stick and brick houses, marshmallow and wooden stick houses and brick printing for our display brick wall. 

We watched a video to learn how bricklaying is done in real life. Then we had a turn building our own brick wall using wooden blocks and “cement” made from sand and shaving foam.