Traditional Tales - The Three Little Pigs
It is the second half of our Spring term and 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 awash with pink - pink, painted, paper-plate pig masks, free drawing and painting pink pigs, curly pink pigtails and pink playdough pigs with pink cotton bud legs.
We listened to many different versions of the Three Little Pigs story, and while most of us thought the Three Pigs were good characters in the tale, some Bears believed the wolf was misunderstood, and actually it was only a sneeze! We drew some wonderfully detailed wolf drawings that were simply too good to paint. 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, shaving foam and palette knives to cement wooden bricks together, marshmallow and wooden stick houses and brick printing for our display brick wall.
In construction, we built towers and different houses using various construction materials. We learnt how to build an interlocking wall with Lego and tried making a corner to develop our house-building skills. Our designs needed to fit a pig or pigs inside, and most importantly, they must keep the pigs safe from the wolf.
On our practical table, we were house builders exploring and building with different materials to find the most effective materials. Then we worked in colour groups, to choose our materials to build a house, and we tested to see if it was weather and wolf proof!
In our construction site role-play, we designed houses, wrote lists and ordered materials, took important phone calls and built walls with bricks and tools. Outside, we had a larger construction site with wheelbarrows, tools, and a work bench. We were challenged to build a wall that was taller than us using foam bricks or Plasbrics. We took the house building process very seriously and were building inspectors, inspecting the school buildings to look at different building materials. We ticked off the materials on our clipboards as we found them. We are happy to report that everything is wolf-proof!
No wolf in our next traditional tale, instead we have a golden-haired girl on the rampage, breaking furniture and eating other people’s food.