F2—  Young Entomologists and Taxonomists!

We have loved being scientists this week! On Tuesday, we worked with Rick and Kevin from The Notts Wildlife Trust.  We learnt soooo much about invertebrates (creatures without a backbone) when we went on our mini beast hunt on the school meadow. We used nets to  ‘sweep’  for creatures, then we carefully put the creatures in a specimen jar so that we could observe them close-up and count the number of legs they had; we also tried to identify what we had caught. We used all this data to see which creatures were the most popular in our sample; we classified our creatures by ‘Number Of Legs’.  The largest group was the  insects— creatures with 6  legs. Our sample also contained arachnids (spiders—8 legs), a harlequin  ladybird (beetle), an ermine moth, annelids (worms) and arthropods (centipedes and millipedes).  We were very good  at learning all the new words to describe what we found. We put our mini beast knowledge into practice when we used clay to make our own mini beasts - we loved working with clay.

Not only did we hunt mini beasts, but we were on the look out for our very special orchids—the Tway Blade Orchid and the Bee Orchid — we learnt that orchids have a plant cycle of 7 years. We were very lucky to find so many orchids in our meadow. Very importantly, we learnt  that we do not pick our wild flowers!

When we were not being scientists,  we wrote some lovely literacy based on The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch, which we have been reading this week. We loved writing in the speech bubbles imagining what  the pesky, cheeky seagulls would say and creating a story board. Miss Frisby made us a secret writing den by putting a blanket over a table and leaving writing equipment in it.

Last week we played lots of parachute games to encourage team work- such as 'cat and mouse', 'the shark game' and 'fruit salad’. We had so much fun. In PE we put our dance skills to the test when we attempted to dance to Zorba the Greek. We also found time this week to go the library (Giraffes), tackle lots of numeracy problems and fit in some playtime! What will we be doing next week?