Our indoor bean seeds have germinated.  We have discovered that seeds only need water to germinate but to continue to grow into healthy beanstalks they also need light and nutrients from the soil.  The children noticed that the leaves were green and we posed the question ‘are all leaves green?’  Everyone went out into the garden to collect different leaves.  Wow, we discovered so many different shades of green!

We planted seeds to grow our very own beanstalk and then wrote instructions for our friends to follow.

The Reception children had to decide whether the giant was a good character or a bad character in this week’s story of Jack and the beanstalk.  We put ourselves into character listening for Jack stealing our treasure and talking about our feelings.  Then we described how the giant looked and how he felt before doing some amazing writing.

After escaping from the giant Jack climbed up a tree in our playground and got stuck!  The children had to find a way to rescue Jack and bring him back to the ground safely.  We had an amazing afternoon exploring all of their ideas including a giant slide, zip wire and bucket pulley system.

Inspired by this week’s story of Jack and the beanstalk the children used the available resources to build a castle for Jack.  The children even tried to build a castle in the clouds!

The answer is a surprisingly large number of different trees as Year 2 have been discovering. We have collected and identified leaves from trees all around the school, looking closely at the similarities and differences between them, to answer our question.

All four school houses can be found: Ash, Beech, (Horse) Chestnut and Oak (two different types!) as well as Scots Pine, Silver Birch, Alder, Rowan, Lime, Field Maple, Sycamore and many others including a tree that 2AH like to call (Mrs) Hawthorn(e)!

Year 6 have been developing their classification skills by creating their own charts to identify British Bumblebees. However, to get the hang of it, we started with something simpler (and tastier) by classifying different sweets.