Everyday, just before home-time, the children settle down on the carpet for story-time. It is always one of their favourite parts of the morning. This week, our stories were decidedly animal-themed…
On Monday, we read a delightful, old favourite; the story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. As you will probably know, the story begins when a tiny (“and very hungry”) caterpillar pops out of an egg. This is one of the key texts for our topic this term (‘Out of the Egg’) and the children have been busy working together to create their very own “big, fat caterpillar” for our entrance area. We will be continuing to add the finishing touches to our display board next week but do look out for our caterpillar at drop off – the children are thrilled with their work and have been paying great attention to detail, ensuring their caterpillar looks like the version in the story.
Exploring colour mixing to make green paint for the caterpillar’s body…
You can watch a particularly lovely animated version of the story here:
On Tuesday, we read another familiar story that links nicely with our topic; Owl Babies. We always make a point of reading this story when we have new children starting in nursery as they often find its familiarity and central message that ‘mummy will come back’ particularly reassuring. The children know the story so well that many have been retelling the story for themselves.
The children have also been enjoying looking after the owl family that have been visiting this week and making sure that the owl babies (Sarah, Percy and Bill) find their way back to their mummy – especially at tidy-up time!
Here’s another lovely animation for you to share at home if you wish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPQRiSTYFHo
On Wednesday we read the story ‘Slowly, Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth’ which is another story by Eric Carle (the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar). This story is full of interesting, unusual animals and the children were particularly taken with the final page which illustrates all the different animals in the book. You can hear the story in full here:
And here’s the final page – isn’t it lovely?
As the children had so many question about these animals, we decided to do a bit of googling and see if we could find any videos of what these animals actually look like in real life. We were all fascinated by a video of a stripey baby tapir, a flying snake and an anteater eating ants with its long, black tongue! You can see these videos by clicking on the links below:
Baby tapir: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/wild/ultimate-animal-countdown/00000144-1520-dcf1-a954-55f97abe0000
Flying snakes: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/wild/ultimate-animal-countdown/00000144-1520-dcf1-a954-55f97abe0000
Anteater: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000144-0a1e-d3cb-a96c-7b1f70fb0000
Do let us know if you happen to do anymore animal research at home! Would love to find out more about these animals. I wonder which ones hatch out of eggs?
On (a particularly chilly) Thursday, we carried on exploring our interest in different animals with yet another Eric Carle book; ‘Polar Bear, Polar Bear, what do you hear’?
This story features even more beautifully illustrated animals. There are three animals in the story that hatch from eggs – do you think you know which ones they are?
We finished the week, on Friday with the story ‘Ow’! by Michael Rosen & Jonathan Langley which tells the tale of how Piggy the Piglet finds himself with a prickly problem and works his way around the farmyard asking all the different farm animals for help.
What a very busy week of stories! I wonder what you will read on Saturday and on Sunday? 😊