Flextangles

I've had this activity bookmarked for ages, just waiting for the right time to try it out and hoping it would work as well as the video shows. They worked brilliantly, I used thin card and then my glue gun to stick them together with but like the look of the Elmer's rubber cement, that they used, so might have to invest in some. The older children loved thinking up different patterns to colour, there is something very therapeutic about these and yes I've enjoyed playing with them too.

                             

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

The children have really enjoyed Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear, we've read it several times and I think it's going to join Going On A Bear Hunt as another firm favourite. They can be heard saying/singing parts of the rhyming story throughout the day, sometimes adding bits of the bear hunt to it. So here are some of the activities we done over the last couple of days.

We made our own Jesse Bear using these teddy bear paper dolls, there are lots of other paper dolls, so to find the bears you will have to scroll down, we used the bare bear and the warm weather clothes.

With the older children, we reread Jesse's meal time and choose from the pictures what he  did/didn't eat  

I have had some packets of cress seeds for a while and had been planning to grow some, so thought why not on a teddy bear shape, fingers crossed it will grow.

Our cress teddy bears two weeks later

Out came our wooden dress up teddies, I love the different facial expressions, it really gets the children talking about what the bears might be thinking, as well as the different clothes they are wearing.

Bears

Set up ready for tomorrow's activity, have searched through the animal toy box and found all our bears, dyed some rice green and had a very pleasant time creating this scene.

I have the Usborne Beginners Bears book and some other fact books on bears for the children to look for. Have also found some lovely clips for us to watch on you tube, first is polar bears, brown bears and then pandas

Story Box and Caves

Having had to empty my tuff tray as I needed it for my river when we acted out the story, I thought I would put all the bits into a story box for the children to enjoy, I used printable cards from Home school Creations to go in the tray so they can sequence the story, match items etc.

It wasn't long before my little ones decided to play with the story box. Lots of chatter and loved the way they greeted the bear when they got to the bear cave before running back home.

Later when they had finished playing, I set up the story up in order and then asked the children to see if they could match up the picture cards to the story scene.

We used paper mache to make some caves for a scene I would like to create later on.

Birdworld

We had a lovely trip to Birdworld this week and I was really pleased to get some lovely photos of some snowy owls, not easy taking pictures through the wire cages. just love this one with the owl winking at us!

Ural owl, framed with the wire cage.

There was some barn owls too but they were hiding all you could see was their feet, so no photo, do love the barn owls.

We loved watching the Humboldt's penguins being fed.

It was great to watch them diving for the fish and swimming so close to the glass.

The odd sneaky heron dived into the penguins to take a fish.

                              

Kookaburra.

Then on to the Jenny Wren farm, with some very cute rabbits and a few baby chicks too, saving some of the photos for theme I'm planning on farms.

Felt very privileged to see a peacock in full show off mode.

We then popped into underwater world and they were able to see some lovely corals, sea anemones, starfish and a hermit crab, lovely to see what they had remembered from our under the sea theme. Rather amusing moment when one child was insistent that the crocodile was just a model until it closed it's eyes!