Minibeasts

This week, we have continued to follow the Exploring Nature with Children curriculum. The theme was minibeasts.

We started off by thinking of minibeasts and describing them. We had a hunt in the garden and found woodlice, spiders, daddy-long-legs, flies, earthworms, slugs and snails. We walked around the village to continue our hunt and saw ladybirds, ants and a butterfly. We also found leaves that had been nibbled.

(EYFS: Communication and Language, Understanding the World, Physical Development)

We set all of the creatures free, discussing why they should be set free and where they might go. Would they go back to their families, perhaps? We talked about how delicate the creatures were and how mindful we should be of this as it is cruel to hurt them.

(EYFS: Personal, Social and Emotional Development)

We used the munched up leaf as the stimulus to read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I had printed off a picture of the life cycle of a butterfly for us to colour in. I compared this to the ages of a person. I showed Betty some drawings of a person at different stages of their life (from baby to elderly) and I asked Betty (who’s almost four) to put them into order.

(EYFS: Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Literacy Development)

Whilst Louie was asleep, the girls (Betty and a little girl that I child mind) enjoyed making caterpillars. I always save paper – wrapping paper, catalogues, magazines, the phone book, and junk mail – for crafts. I cut out circles from various things. (I would have let them do the cutting but I couldn’t find the kids’ scissors and mine are super sharp!) The girls looked through the circles looking for interesting patterns and colours and stuck them onto their sheets to make caterpillars. I extended this by starting patterns and asking them what would come next.

(EYFS: Expressive Arts and Design, Mathematics)

Today, we have had lots of rain showers so we visited the library to find books that featured minibeasts and looked at both fiction and non-fiction. Then, we visited the natural history section of the local museum to have a look at their collections of minibeasts.

(EYFS: Communication & Language, Literacy, Understanding the World)

This afternoon, we really enjoyed reading Norman the Slug with a Silly Shell. I drew some slugs and the children drew and painted a shell for the slugs.

(EYFS: Literacy, Expressive Arts and Design)