What a busy and wonderful week Owls have had! 

We began the week with some more planting and growing. After checking in on our cress and seeing it had grown beautifully, we tasted a bit and talked about what we could see, smell and taste. Then we moved onto our main growing focus for the week - sunflowers! We compared the sunflower seeds to the cress seeds and made predictions about whether what we grew with the sunflower seeds would be bigger or smaller than the cress. We looked at some pictorial instructions for planting seeds and added in some 'bossy instructions'! We then followed these instructions to plant our own sunflower seeds outside. We will look after these over the coming weeks and hopefully see the start of some sunflowers before we break up for the summer. As their writing task this week, the children sequenced the pictures we had followed and wrote their own instructions! 

In maths, we have been recapping repeating patterns. Earlier in the year, we learnt how to continue and make our own ABAB repeating patterns. This week we extended upon that by looking at ABCABC/ABBABB patterns. We went outside and used a variety of resources to complete some patterns before having a go at making our own. 

In art, we developed our observational drawing skills and used some watercolour paints to create our own still life images of some flowers! The children made a wonderful effort at looking closely at the different shapes and colours they could see in the variety of flowers. 

We introduced a new phonics game this week which the children absolutely loved! They had to wear a 'phonics party hat' which had a secret sentence or word written on it. They worked in pairs and their partner would also have a hat with some different words on. Their job was to read aloud what was written on their partner's hat and dictate to them, whilst their partner listened and wrote the sentence on their board. The children listened beautifully to each other, and I was really impressed with their dictation and writing skills! 

The main event of this week was, of course, our first Forest School session! The children had a whale of a time! We learnt the safety rules of Forest School and then had a big explore. We found bugs, different leaves, learnt how to tell if someone likes butter or not using a buttercup flower, visited the pond and found some tadpoles, climbed the big tree, clambered up and jumped off the mound and finished with toasting marshmallows on the fire. Thank you to all the parents and carers who were so patient at home time whilst we reunited the children with their belongings! 

Congratulations to our Star of the week... Theo! Theo has impressed all the adults in Owls this week with his perseverance and resilient attitude to learning. Well done Theo! 

A note for next week's Forest School - Next week Forest School will be on Thursday 9th May. The following week will be Friday as usual.