Once upon a time in the early years the focus was all about reading and storytelling with the topic of ‘Once upon a time’.
We started the term looking at the traditional tale of Goldilocks and the children used lots of maths, measuring and weighing to make porridge and used time connectives to retell the story in order. Should Goldilocks have gone into somebody’s house that she doesn’t know? This was a great thread for discussion in our PHSE lesson, however it was midweek that the children came into their classroom to find a police crime scene, marking up a broken chair, eaten porridge and a lone red ribbon on the floor. Who could this have been?
Our early year’s children directed their leaning, donning police outfits to find out if anybody had seen anything. The reception children created wanted posters with fabulous writing and the preschool children drew their best mugshots of the suspect, Goldilocks.
This led to an anonymous email being sent to Mrs Reed, it contained CCTV footage of someone in our classroom trying three bowls of porridge and breaking baby bears chair. It was surely Goldilocks.
The excitement and immersive play continued all week with the children’s insistence on being referred to as ‘officer’ showing their commitment to solving the crime.
Keeping with the theme of traditional tales the children then planted their own beanstalks and are currently monitoring there growth with the sheer optimism of 3, 4 and 5 year olds that there will be a castle at the top! Alongside the science exploration of the life cycle of a bean we have also measured height and length and ordered the length of our foot prints alongside the huge giant footprints we found.
Throughout this term we have invited members of staff and parents to come in and share their favourite story with the early year’s children and we’ve had a great response. We’ve loved listening to other people read and the children have shown their engagement with their amazing attention and recall of the stories they have heard. It has also been a wonderful way of the children interacting with members of staff that they may not necessarily meet until they are further up the school and for the children to hear some stories from a range of eras. To continue within this topic and following the children’s sparked imaginations we have planned a library visit and will participate in the whole school celebration of world book day.
We are having a magical time down in the Early Years with this topic and look forward to exploring other traditional tales and favourite authors such as Julia Donaldson.
And they all lived happily ever after
The end.