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.

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.

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 creative table, we covered a milk bottle with tissue paper in a patchwork effect to create Elmer. We were encouraged to think about our patchwork design and make sure no colours were the same next to each other. Once our Elmers were dry, we added googly eyes, patchwork ears and a wool tassel tail. 

In the story Elmer's Special Day, it is time for the annual Elmer's Day celebrations. All the elephants noisily paint themselves with wild colourful patterns in preparation for the parade. The Bears created their own colourful patterned elephants with coloured pen control Elmers, sticker Elmers and bead collage playdough Elmers. We wrote sentences to describe our patterned Elmers, using our colour and pattern word banks to help us.

On our green practical table, we baked and decorated elephant-shaped biscuits. We created playdough elephants using shaped cutters and made elephant skin textures with playdough tools. To develop and strengthen our fine motor control, we used tweezers to place coloured cubes onto Elmer mats.

On the creative table, we needed patience and control to paint the squares on a large Elmer. We were encouraged to hold the paintbrushes correctly, paint within the lines and think about the colours we painted. We painted the first side with adult support and encouragement and the second side we painted independently. Our final job was to stuff Elmer by screwing up newspapers and joining him together using staples to join the painted squared paper to make our 3D puffy Elmer.

For our Colour and Pattern topic, we have created a new Rainbow Fish display in the classroom. We painted and collaged shiny, colourful fish scales to decorate our Rainbow Fish. Rainbow Fish recognises he is special with his scales, every shade of blue, green and purple, with sparkling silver scales among them. So we thought, shared and wrote about why each of us were special.  Finally, we added a large octopus with paper chain tentacles to our Rainbow Fish display. 

Our role-play clothes shop has been a popular area of the classroom, with the Bears using their own experiences of shopping to adapt their play. On small world, we developed our story telling with an underwater Rainbow Fish scene and characters. 

On the writing table, we created a colour word bank to use in our colour and pattern topic writing. We labelled the Rainbow Fish, then wrote a description. We are starting to use the phase 3 sounds that we are learning in phonics. We loved listening to the adventures of the Rainbow Fish and his friends, so we wrote about what was happening in a picture prompt from the story. Everyone could think of an interesting sentence and some of our sentences included adjectives! 

On the creative table, we painted a wavy ocean background with blue and green paint, then added collage materials and attached a rainbow fish with a spring to create a 3D effect artwork. We also carefully designed a foil fish with a shiny scale design created by removing paint with cotton buds. 

We made sparkly CD fish and colourful scale-patterned fish to create an underwater display above our carpet area. The Bears love it! There were lots of woos and wows when they arrived at school and saw their fish hanging from the ceiling.

Have a look at this video.

In the countdown to Christmas, our Christmas classroom experiences were based around the story of The Jolly Christmas Postman, written by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. On small world we retold the story of the Christmas postman as he delivered greetings to the fairy-tale characters. In role play, we opened a Christmas Post Office, with money, weighing scales, a till, parcels and lots of stationery. We loved playing and exploring this area of our classroom.

Prompted by a letter we received from The Jolly Christmas Postman, we created Christmas wish lists, then wrote letters to Father Christmas. We addressed envelopes and posted them in our class postbox. A kind Christmas postman collected our letters and delivered them to Father Christmas. We even designed and created self-portrait Christmas stamps. 

Snowmen popped up everywhere around our classroom. We made a snowman by racing with a friend to fill a bottle with cotton wool snowballs. We also made a flat transient art snowman and built a playdough snowman in our snowman factory. In construction, we used bricks to build post boxes. We had to design and create an enclosed box with a slot that would keep letters safe and dry. We also helped the Jolly Christmas Postman to deliver his letters by building different vehicles for the snowy weather. A peddle bike isn't great in the snow! 

We were very busy creating lots of top-secret crafts for us to take home for Christmas - printed tissue paper wrapping, Christmas jars, Christmas decorations, reindeer food and more. We also built and decorated Christmas trees in lots of different ways.

We sang and acted to rehearse our nativity for performances for the school and parents.  We all felt very proud of our little actors. Meanwhile, in RE, we learnt why Christians perform Nativity plays at Christmas. We talked about how the birth of Jesus is known as the nativity and is an important event for Christians. We looked at images of the nativity, played and explored our classroom nativity scene and talked about advent traditions. We even made our own hand printed wreath.

A countdown to Christmas with a Christmas concert, a Christmas dinner and a visit from Father Christmas.

Finally, it was time for our Christmas party. We danced and played traditional games, and even had a special visitor to our classroom. As we listened to The Polar Express story, we heard sleigh bells, so we quickly ran outside to investigate. We could hear the bells, but we did not see Santa. When we returned to the classroom, we were met by snowy footprints and a pile of presents. We must have been on the good list! 

On our creative table, we made large tissue paper pompom flowers to hang in our wedding role-play.

We designed and created wedding outfits for Harry and Betty, and painted a sky and cornfield background with watercolour for our scarecrows to stand in. 

The popular transient art materials came out to create large-scale scarecrows with our natural resources. 

In role play, we celebrated with a birthday tea party, including balloons, banners, party hats, presents, cards and birthday cake. Around the classroom, we worked hard to prepare and make our party a big success. We wrote party lists, inflated balloons, worked with a friend to wrap presents, made cakes, decorated party hats, and created birthday cards for Kipper.

We shared pictures from a birthday and our friends had to guess how old we were from the clues in the photos. Then we wrote about our birthday using our birthday photo to help us.

In our construction area, we were cake designers and bakers, building and balancing layers of a cake and testing them to see if they were stable enough to be carried. We were encouraged to think about how we could make our cake stronger, thinking about how we could join the pieces or stack the layers from largest to smallest. We also created cakes from sand and playdough on our green practical table.

On small world, we retold the Hindu story of Rama and Sita. The theme of the story is light overcoming dark and good (Rama and Sita) overcoming evil (the demon Ravana). In construction, we built bridges to help Rama cross to the island to save Sita.

During Diwali, bright rangoli patterns are drawn on the floor to welcome visitors. The rangoli represents happiness and positivity, and we enjoyed colouring the rangoli patterns with bright pastels and working outside in groups creating rangoli with chalks.  

We traced and created mehndi patterns on hand outlines and made playdough mandalas by pressing seeds and beans into playdough. 

On the practical table, we created diya lamps with sparkly playdough and beads. Later in the week, we progressed to clay. We modelled the clay, then painted and decorated our lamps. 

In role-play, we recreated our own firework celebration experiences. We sat around a fire wrapped in hats, scarves and gloves toasting marshmallows, drinking hot chocolate and waving our sparkler fireworks.

On the creative table, we made our pretend sparklers with foil streamers and straws, and learnt how to use sticky tape to secure our streamers to the straw. We created fireworks with chalk on chalkboards and were encouraged to think about the colours and shapes we had seen in a firework display. 

On the practical table, we used sparkly collage materials, then coloured playdough and glitter to make firework scenes on the laminated black mats. 

The mean green pea was up to no good. Luckily, the Super Bears were on hand to help Supertato tackle the mischievous Evil Pea.  

We drafted in some lolly stick super me characters too.

We put our superpowers to good use by searching for hidden sounds, numbers and shapes with our supervision, and listening with our super ears on a sound walk in the copse.

 We were super writers practising our letter formation and creating speech bubbles.  

We created skeletons in every area of our Bears classroom, on chalkboards, with chalk on black paper, cotton bud skeletons, pipe cleaner skeletons, playdough skeletons, skeletons drawn on the playground, loose part skeletons and even large jigsaw skeletons too. Please take a look at the skeletons on display in our book area.

 On our blue writing table, we shared the story in groups.

Then we sequenced pictures from the story to make our own concertina FunnyBones book, and used our books to help us retell the FunnyBones story. Next, we created a new page for the book and thought about what the Big Skeleton and Little Skeleton might say in their new adventure. 

 We started our topic with Wonderful Me and a wonderful gallery of self-portraits using different mediums - paint, playdough, transient art materials and 2D shapes. 

Next, Our School with the story of the week: Starting School by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Small world was a school scene, to play and act out school with our mini me blocks, and we took tours of our new school to visit different areas and meet staff. We practised our cutting skills by sticking school uniform to our body outlines, and we made friendship bracelets to give to a new friend. We even copied our school badge to make a playdough Beckers Bee.

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Lots of mark making in different sensory trays and some swishing and twisting with dance, music and large movements.  We manipulate playdough in Dough Disco and have a weekly fun pen disco. 

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We practised our palaeontology skills to unearth chocolate chips from cookies, and unearthed dinosaurs from sand and ice. Next, we made our own dinosaur fossils with pasta and playdough. Finally, we made a fossil by rolling clay into a ball, rolling it, flattening it and pressing a dinosaur skeleton into the clay. 

On the creative table, we printed handprints then turned them into dinosaurs, adding dinosaur features like frills, horns and spikes. We named our handprint dinosaurs and labelled the features we had drawn.

We also created a dinosaur using a paper plate, paint, pegs and ribbons.

We wrote a list of the foods the Very Hungry Caterpillar ate - it was a very long list! Next, we wrote an independent sentence, then edited it to write a more interesting sentence. Finally, we wrote a sequence of sentences to create our own Very Hungry Caterpillar stories.

In role play, we were scientists identifying, drawing, classifying and labelling minibeasts. Most of our minibeasts were plastic, but we had some real-life caterpillars too. We observed and recorded the changes as our caterpillars formed a chrysalis and then emerged as butterflies. 

We created our own paper plate butterfly lifecycles.

On our creative table, we printed caterpillars with marshmallows, then larger ones with balloons. We looked closely at the Eric Carle image of the caterpillar, to add details including a face, multicoloured hairs on his back, legs and antennae. Then, we painted fruits for our caterpillars to munch their way through. 

We listened to different versions of the story. Then the Bears worked together to act out and sequence the events to pull an enormous turnip from the ground. On our writing table, we used our phonics to label a picture of the characters pulling the enormous turnip. We noticed the use of an exclamation mark when the characters were speaking. So we chose one of the characters from the story and wrote a speech bubble of what they would say, using an exclamation mark to show surprise, excitement or to show that the character was shouting.

On our green table, we explored different vegetables, and used our senses to describe and name them. We washed and chopped vegetables to make a vegetable soup. Then we tasted our soup with mixed reactions. Some of us loved it, others not as much. 

Pulling an enormous turnip from the ground and moving it is a challenge, so we used our construction materials to build models to help the characters. 

On our creative table we recreated the cover of The Tiny Seed book. First, we created a colourful splatter background using toothbrushes. Then we added a green crepe paper stem with leaves, tissue paper petals and a circular centre to our flower with a seed pattern printed with cotton buds. 

On our practical table we built a flower picture using parts of real flowers and some natural collage materials. We looked closely at flowers and their parts and sorted them into roots, stems, leaves, petals and flowers. We used our new plant vocabulary to label the parts of a flowering plant.

We explored the art of Van Gogh and looked closely at a sunflower plant to observe, then draw with charcoal, pastels and paint. We created a sunflower lifecycle, and we hoped to watch our own sunflower lifecycle by planting sunflower seeds. We wrote instructions on how to plant a sunflower seed.

Inspired by the blossom trees around us, we painted trees with pink and white fingerprinted blossoms, and created chocolate playdough blossom trees with pink beaded blossoms.  We crafted intricate blossoms for our Tell Me Tree. They may look like scrunched tissue paper, but I promise the process was much more technical, as we cut, folded and delicately peeled the paper. 

Our first story to explore is Jasper's Beanstalk, written by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen. Jasper is a frustrated gardener who wants to grow a beanstalk, but he grows impatient, so he digs the bean back up and throws it away. The Bears have planted beans, and ours are growing well. We wrote instructions for planting our beans, and used time language to sequence our instructions. We are taking photos and drawing our bean plants to record our observations. 

Jasper waited and waited for his beanstalk to grow. The Bears wrote a diary of what Jasper did each day to encourage his beanstalk to grow. 

On the writing table we labelled pictures of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. The sneaky Wolf needed to be caught to ensure no more young girls were tricked, and no more grannies gobbled up. So we drew and wrote a wanted poster. We tried to include some adjectives to help us write a description of the Big Bad Wolf - grey fur, sharp claws and pointy teeth. Fortunately, Granny was saved, the Wolf was caught, and he felt sorry, so we wrote apology letters from the Wolf to Granny. 

On the creative table, we explored drawing what we could see through observational drawings of a basket of fruit and a vase of flowers. The Bears listened and watched brilliantly, as I modelled how to notice and draw. They were encouraged to see details like colours, shapes and patterns. Next, they tried independently with pencils, then moved onto drawing and colouring with pastels. Our observational drawings were really very special.

On arrival, we set down our packed lunches in the large Barleylands Barn where we would eat lunch. Then we began the general theme of the day - animals, drinking, toileting and handwashing (the drinking and toileting was us, although the animals did this too). 

First stop, a wild cat talk as we watched the servals have breakfast. Next, some cuddly animals - Biscuit the rabbit and her guinea pig friends.

Then we were off on our bumpy tractor and trailer ride around the farm. Feeling hungry and ready for lunch, we walked back to the large barn (meeting different animals as we walked) to wash our hands and eat on hay bales. Fed and watered, we were off again.

Next, some pony grooming. With the ponies looking groomed, we moved on to feeding the goats. The Bears were all so excited and confident as they fed the goats from their hands. A whole bag of animal feed and some well-fed goats later and into the Animal Barn to see pigs, sheep, and more goats (oops we should have saved some food). 

More handwashing, and then off to visit the highland cows and miniature donkeys, giving the geese a wave as we passed. It was almost time to leave, so we walked quickly back to the barn to collect our things and have a final toilet stop before we left. We just managed to squeeze in time to meet the different birds of prey, including kestrels, vultures, and different species of owls. Then tucked in the corner were the cheeky meerkats, who looked like they were having a sports day, as they ran up and down in lines. 

What an amazing day! The adults were so incredibly proud of them all. The Bears listened well, followed instructions, and were fun and engaged all day. 

Back in school we wrote some independent sentences about our day and labelled a Barleylands Farm map. What did you like best? 'Everything!', was the reply.

We celebrated the coronation of King Charles III, with a garden party role play, an outside street party, coronation singing and much flag waving. We were great party hosts writing invitations, weaving placemats, making sandwiches and decorating cakes. We even escaped the rain. 

On the writing table, we sequenced pictures from The King's Runaway Crown to create a story map, and we wrote labels for each London landmark. We used our story maps to write sentences to report the problem on our Palace News front page. We recorded our celebrations by writing a coronation recount.

On our small world King Charles, Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family chased Colin the king's dog around the London landmarks, with shouts of 'Catch Colin! Save the crown!' The Bears have loved this story, especially the shouty bits!

We used our construction materials and loose parts to create small and large scale models of the London landmarks. We even created crowns with magnetic polydron and placed them on a display cushion and added a label.

On our creative table we painted portraits of the king and drew half-and-half portraits before painting with watercolours. We created crowns to wear at our celebrations and finger painted flags for us to wave.

I must mention our mini-marathon record attempt - super enthusiasm, great energy, big smiles and 267 laps. We were awesome!

Next week we continue our Come Outside topic with The Tiny Seed, a beautifully descriptive book that describes the journey of a seed as it survives through the seasons, to grow into a giant flower.

Finally, we thought of ideas to innovate the story with things we would grow in our pots - a monkey, an elephant, a dinosaur, a robin, a cheetah and more great ideas. We put our elephant idea into Emma's story and it sounded great. We were very proud of the Bears and their super behaviour, and fabulous listening skills. Well done Bears!

In the Queen's Hat, the wind went swish and blew the Queen's hat right off her head. So the Bears designed a new hat for the Queen and unbelievably up blew a gust of wind and whoosh, our hats are now hanging in different places around the classroom.

On our writing table, we created story maps with simple sketches and labels of the London landmarks. Then we wrote sentences, using prepositions to describe where the Queen's hat had been.

In our role-play area, we celebrated the Platinum Jubilee with a garden party.