Colour and Pattern with Aliens Love Underpants

Aliens who love stealing pants landed in our Bears class, as we explored the Aliens Love Underpants story written by Clare Freedman and Ben Cort. We took a small step into space to play and build our understanding through a space station role-play experience and our small world helped us to retell and adapt the adventure story of aliens, rockets, and pants!
On the writing table, we made marks in different ways, using magic screens, foil and chalkboards. We wrote space words, practised name writing, and wrote the phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs. We even wrote lying on our backs inside our space station, just like an astronaut in space!
Aliens Love Underpants was our main story focus, but we also took the opportunity to read lots of space-themed stories, such as Beegu, The Smeds and the Smoos, Look Up!, How to Catch a Star and more. We also shared 'Whatever Next' a story written by Jill Murphy. We listened to the story, then filled a backpack with the things we would take with us into space, just like Baby Bear. Finally, we made a paper backpack and wrote a list to put inside.
We created paper plate spaceships, and drew an alien to travel inside our spaceship. We explored speech in the Aliens Love Underpants story, then wrote a speech bubble for our alien.
On the creative table, we painted on clingfilm and foil to paint the view from inside a spaceship. A fun and interesting way to paint - the Bears loved it! We explored colour mixing with jars, food colouring, and syringes, building on our previous colour mixing learning with ice cubes. In pen disco we listened to a Sky Full of Stars by Coldplay, as we danced, sung, and drew rockets, planets and stars.
We painted colourful aliens to decorate our space station and painted patterns onto pants to hang on a class washing line.
Inspired by the story 'Look Up!', we went outside to paint a meteor shower using a splatter technique. Our meteor paintings have created a background for our 'Look Up!' display to show off our painted aliens, spaceships and patterned pants!.
On the practical table, we explored moon rocks, and cosmic sensory trays filled with alien slime, gloop and moon dough. We created playdough aliens and a washing line of pants. We investigated how a rocket lifts off with a balloon rocket experiment, and made an eruption with bicarbonate of soda, water, food colouring and vinegar. We also made and ate a toasted, patterned pair of pants!
Have a look at the recording of our experiment to show how a balloon flies across string because of air and thrust - just like a rocket! As the air is released out of the balloon in one direction, the force propels the balloon in the other direction. This equal but opposite force causes the balloon to fly across the string like a rocket!