Our role-play transformed into Three Bears cottage. Then one morning, the Bears arrived at school to discover the Three Bears had disappeared. We found a broken chair, the porridge had been eaten, flowers were tipped over, and kitchen utensils were everywhere. Our cottage was really quite a mess! When we recovered from the shock, we set about investigating who could have possibly done such a thing. We all agreed it must have been Goldilocks!

On the creative table, we painted bright, beautiful Three Bears cottages, and created Goldilocks and Bears puppets with paint and collage. We used our puppets to help us retell the story, giving Daddy Bear a loud, growling voice and Baby Bear a quiet, squeaky voice.

On our practical table, we made playdough story characters with cutters, tools, and collage materials and larger loose part bears with natural resources. We cut and fixed together split pin Goldilocks and Three Bears. It was quite a challenge to cut carefully, and try not to lose a body part. We explored capacity with porridge oats and water, and sorted everyday objects into groups of hard and soft materials.   

Together we retold the traditional tale to create a class story map. Then on our writing table, we sequenced the pictures and annotated a story map with vocabulary from the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story. 

We made and tasted porridge, choosing from a selection of toppings, and wrote about our porridge tasting in our coloured porridge bowl outlines. Most of us loved the porridge, so we had a second serving, and all of us were brave enough to taste something new. Our porridge seemed to be just right! We picked our favourite topping and created a class pictogram to show which topping we liked best.

Feeling quite fed up with the naughtiness of Goldilocks, we designed and built a trap to stop her. We had to think about what we would need and how it would work. This worked well when the trap was laid on the carpet, but some of us needed to make some alterations because when we picked up our trap to show how it would work, Goldilocks fell right out and that just wouldn't do! We thought we should replace the broken furniture, so we used our construction materials to make new chairs, tables and beds for the Bears. 

We talked about which characters in the story made bad choices and why. Then we voted for characters using our coloured pictures. Everyone agreed that Goldilocks had made bad choices.

At Beckers Green, our focus for World Book Day was reading for pleasure. One of Mrs Jones’ favourite activities is reading to the Bears – especially funny stories that make them laugh.
We loved welcoming our families into the classroom to read with us. It was so special to share stories together and celebrate our love of books. Thank you to everyone who was able to join us.

In the afternoon, the EYFS teachers swapped classes to share a story. Miss Wheatley from Antelopes visited us to read a story, while Mrs Jones went to read one of our favourites, The Book with No Pictures, to the Antelopes class. The children enjoyed hearing stories from different teachers.

We also visited the library in our colour groups. We explored the shelves, chose books to take home and share, and we listened to another story together.

As part of our afternoon, we had lots of fun searching for objects linked to stories we know and love. The Bears and the Antelopes were very excited when they spotted:
Underpants for Aliens Love Underpants
A tractor for The Scarecrows’ Wedding
The caterpillar from The Very Hungry Caterpillar
A rocket for Whatever Next!
A leaf for Leaf Man
An elephant for the Large Family stories
Bricks for The Three Little Pigs
A dinosaur for The Worrysaurus
A hedgehog for Hovis the Hedgehog
A potato for Supertato
A balloon for Kipper’s Birthday
A broom for Room on the Broom

We had a wonderful day celebrating stories, imagination and the joy of reading together!

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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.