St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Exmouth

Summer Term 2024

A big welcome to our new families who have joined us in Foundation this term.
Also welcome back to all our existing families.
We are looking forward to a Summer term with lots of sunshine and fabulous learning opportunities to explore together.
Keep an eye out on Tapestry for our weekly learning uploads.
These memos will provide you with an overview of all the learning we have planned for that week. 
We have some very exciting visitors - Caterpillars! The children are enjoying learning about the life cycle of the butterfly. They are all looking forward to seeing how the caterpillars grow, how they make their cocoons and they are especially excited about seeing them turn into butterflies just like the ‘Very Hungry Caterpillar’ did.
The children were asked what they thought heaven looked like. We had such lovely conversations of how peaceful and quiet and cloudy it would be. Here are some of our thoughts.
Caterpillar update..................................................................
Wow! Look at how much our caterpillars have grown! We are really enjoying watching them each day. We are waiting to see the next stage of the life cycle. They will hopefully soon make their cocoons.
Our caterpillars have been metamorphosing!!  They are now chrysalides or cocoons.
More of our special visitors have been hatching out of their chrysalides today. We count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 butterflies so far!
Someone mentioned they felt sad that the butterflies were being released but we talked about how it was not fair to keep the butterflies in the classroom and that they needed to go into their natural habitat in order to live happily. We also talked about how they will fly away and lay some eggs to start the lifecycle all over again.
The children have really enjoyed watching this lifecycle happen right before their very eyes. It was lovely to hear them cheer and see them wave goodbye as the butterflies flew off.
We have been exploring with clay. We concentrated on the textures. We discussed how it felt. Was it hard, soft, rough, smooth? Then we discussed if they could pinch it, roll it, cut it? Did it mould well or was it too hard?
Olive said it was soft but it won't roll because it was solid. she found it easier to break it apart with her hands.
Mireya told me her clay felt rough and it was difficult to cut with the tools.
Benji said the clay felt cold and tough.
Xander said the clay was rough and hard. Xander made dents in the clay by banging it with a wooden rolling pin.
Acorn class have enjoyed counting objects and matching them to numicons. We expanded our learning by matching numbers too. The children worked together to thread cubes onto string, they needed to count the numicons to find out how many cubes they needed. We worked together to put our numbers in order.