Week 6

This week has been full of poetry! We started with the question: ‘What is a poem?’ Which led us to think about all the poems we know and what they had in common. We decided that poems needed words, rhythm and that some poems used rhyming so that when you read it aloud it almost sounds like a song. We then split into our key groups and chose a minibeast poem to learn by heart and perform to each other. The children quickly picked up the words and thought of actions to accompany them. The performances were brilliant and we were really impressed by the ducklings confidence and speaking skills!

We then had a go at innovating a poem we know (Ladybird by Liz Brownlee) together and using all the children’s ideas we composed our very first poem:

BEETLE

Black shiny beetle

Underneath the logs,

Digging underground

And hiding from the dogs!

Our final task in Literacy was to learn about performance poetry. We listened to a poem from Joseph Coelho called 'To the countryside' which describes a car journey from a busy city to the peaceful countryside. The performance technique for the poem is called 'Diminuendo' which means getting quieter as you go along. We practised joining in with the poem, using instruments to support our performance and trying to get quieter as the poem progressed. We found this tricky at first but had lots of fun practising and improving the performance.

In Personal Social and Emotional Development sessions, we listened to a poem all about emotions. We revisited our zones of regulation and linked the different verses in the poem to the different zones. The Ducklings were so good at remembering each zone and could use the toolkit to suggest ideas about how we could return to the green zone when we found ourselves to be in the blue, yellow or red zones.

In Understanding the World, we learnt some important facts about insects and their habitats. We then learnt the insect song that goes to the tune of ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’ and describes the different parts of an insect’s body.

What a brilliant term of learning Ducklings! We hope you have enjoyed our minibeast topic and we wish you and your families a wonderful half term break.