Squirrels News – 29th April 2022

This week we have been learning all about fiction and non-fiction books with the help of our topic book I Wonder Why Caterpillars Eat So Much and Other Questions about Life Cycles by Belinda Weber.  

In our learning we looked at various features of non-fiction books such as the contents page and glossary and discussed what makes them different from fiction books. The children thoroughly enjoyed this topic and spent most of the week pulling non-fiction books out of the book corner to discover facts and lots of new information about various animals.  

To complement our learning of animals through non-fiction books we decided to explore life cycles, focusing on the life cycle of a butterfly. We discussed the different stages of the life cycle of a butterfly and learned lots of new vocabulary such as ‘pupa’ and ‘cocoon’ to support our learning. We continued this focus in our Maths Focus Time where we looked at symmetry and created beautiful butterfly pictures by printing on paper.

Later in the week we worked together to use the non-fiction books to discover facts that we found particularly interesting in order to create our very own class non-fiction book!

We extended our learning on our Outdoor Learning Day where we had lots of fun using the magnifying glasses and microscopes to observe all the wonderful bugs we found in closer detail. We worked together to count how many legs the bugs had and looked to see if any of the bugs were symmetrical. The children were fascinated to see all the detail on the insects which appeared on the iPad when linked up to the microscope. It was also wonderful to see how the children’s confidence has grown when climbing trees; they are getting ever higher and higher and increasingly climbing independently.