Traditional Tales - The Three Little Pigs

We started our Traditional Tales topic with 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. We are beginning to understand the elements of a story: the setting - where and when it takes place, the characters, - the people or animals in the story and the plot - the events that happen in the story.
For the tale of The Three Little Pigs, our role-play transformed into a construction site. The Bears loved the construction role play, and we have seen some super house designing, great teamwork and clever brick wall building.

On our writing table, we completed phoneme frames to create a 3 little pigs story word bank. We read sentences, matched pictures and put the sentences in the correct order to tell the story. Together, we retold the story to create a story map to help us write and illustrate our own three little pigs story books. 

On our practical table, we were house designers and builders exploring different materials to find the most effective materials to keep the pigs safe. After several days of testing house designs, we worked in our colour groups, to make a final plan, choose materials, build a house, then test to see if it was weather and wolf proof! The Bears worked brilliantly in their teams, demonstrating how their house building designs and skills had improved. Mrs Smyth and Mrs Carvalho popped in during the process and were very impressed! The testing videos are fantastic, I hope you enjoyed watching them on Tapestry.

In maths, we engaged with activities to develop our understanding of composition (the numbers within numbers), with a key focus to explore ways to represent numbers using the die pattern. For our second little pigs week, we were comparing with the focus on the number in a set. We noticed if quantities were equal or unequal, and we tried to manipulate the number of objects in 2 sets to make them equal. We reinforced the language of 'more than', 'fewer than', and an 'equal number' to describe how many objects there are in each set. 

On the creative table, we printed a class brick wall for our Traditional Tales display, made collage houses for the pigs, painted pink pig paper plate masks to support our oral storytelling and created pink pigs by mixing paint. The classroom was very pink, with no big, bad wolf in sight, so we mixed colours to paint a grey wolf. Our wolf paintings are fantastic, with scary sharp claws, pointy teeth and angry eyes. 

Our next traditional tale doesn't have a big, bad wolf, just a golden haired girl that enters other peoples houses, eats their food and breaks their furniture.