This week our topic was Duffy’s Lucky Escape by Ellie Jackson which was an extension from last week’s topic of International Earth Day. In the book, we meet Duffy the turtle and follow her on her journey in the ocean. Unfortunately, the ocean is full of plastic and Duffy narrowly escapes getting very sick from the plastic when she mistakes it for food and accidentally eats it. Luckily there are some humans nearby to help! The children really enjoyed engaging with this topic book and discussing how water pollution affects the sea and the lives of marine animals.
Taking inspiration from our topic book, we decided to set up our Role Play area as an ocean, We hung rubbish from the ceiling so the children could experience water pollution from the ocean animals' point of view. They enjoyed pretending to clean the ocean and worked together to separate the different objects into the correct boxes based on their material.
To extend the children’s interest in this topic and their endless questions about the lives of ocean animals we set up a table with different books about ocean animals and the environment so that the children could independently explore and extend their curiosity and learning further. This table proved very popular amongst the children, and it was lovely to hear their conversations, sharing facts and information they had learned from the books with each other.
We continued our learning on our Outdoor Learning Day where the children helped collect rubbish and clean up our environment. We recapped our knowledge from the story about how plastic and rubbish can affect the wildlife in our environment and spoke about the ways we can all help our planet. The Fledglings also had the opportunity to plant the seed bombs which they created last week and we can’t wait to see how they grow over the next few weeks! In Art, the children used bubbles wrap and green paint to create seaweed and then they created individual ocean animals using different media such as paint, felt tip pens and tissue paper. Another popular activity this week was our Story Spoons and our mini theatre which the children enjoyed using to create their own stories. They created stories individually as well as in pairs and in small groups and other children enjoyed being the audience and listening to their peers’ stories. The children used their imagination and knowledge of books to continue the stories and it was amazing to hear the many exciting stories with the most interesting twists and turns which also encouraged the children’s personal, social and emotional development as well as their communication and language skills.