In the Let’s Explore project, your child will explore their class environment and school grounds so that they feel settled and happy in their new surroundings. They will learn about the local environment and find out about places they have visited on holiday. They will look at and create maps for journeys.

Supporting your child at home

• Use Google Earth to explore the locality.
• Go on a walk around your local community and talk about the things that you see.
• Encourage your child to talk about the activities they enjoy doing at school.
• Share and discuss the Did you know? resource below.

Did you know?

Fantasy Worlds

We kicked off an imagination fuelled week by thinking about what our own fantasy worlds looked like, and painting them! The children had everything from upside down trees, flying cats, blue sunshine and rainbow skies. 

Under, Over and Through

The perfect opportunity for team work and cooperation! Together the children built an obstacle course thinking about ways to go under, over and through! 😊 

Boxes

We read the story ‘My Cat Likes to hide in Boxes’ and had a go at making our own dens! The children were split into two groups and had just cardboard, blankets and pegs to construct their dens! We think they did a great job! 👏  

Mazes

The children were set the challenge of building a maze out of Lego bricks. Working in groups, they had lots of fun creating ‘dead ends’ and ways through their maze, then they swapped over and tried each other’s out! 😊

We have discussed how Youlgrave is a village, in the county of Derbyshire. (Ask your child to see if they can remember our county!). On Wednesday we introduced the children to our Bee Bots, and took them on a journey through our make shift village of Youlgrave. We used lots of directional language when thinking about which way we needed our Bee Bot to travel.   

Our topic has had us thinking about where we live. The children drew pictures of their favourite rooms in their houses and talked about what makes them so special. 
 

We looked at maps and google earth to view our village and track some of the routes we walk to and from school. 

The children had a look at pictures of Youlgrave from the past and compared them to the village now, looking at what had changed and asking the children which photo they preferred and why. 

We really enjoyed reading the story Mr Gumpy’s Outing. We made a boat, and acted out the story, taking turns to be the different animals and Mr Gumpy himself! They did a brilliant job getting into character, remembering and joining in with the lines the animals said. 🙂

Today we really enjoyed looking through the children's holiday photos and talking about the places they had visited, how they travelled there and if their holiday location had any similarities or differences to Youlgrave. The children went on to design a postcard from their holiday destination. 

We looked at the pictures below from around the world and discussed the differences between the different parts of the world; climate, scenery, wildlife etc... and how it compared to where we live in Youlgrave. The children shared their favourite place and where they might like to visit and why.