On the mark-making and writing table, we made marks in trays of bright-coloured sprinkles. We wrote a list of the different things we might need at our party and used our phonics to help us write the sounds we could hear. We wrote a birthday card for Kipper and wrote about our own birthday, using our birthday photos to help us. We loved sharing our birthday photos with our friends, and we tried to guess which Bear was in the photo and which birthday they were celebrating from the clues in the photos. 

In our construction area, we were cake designers and bakers, building and balancing layers of a cake and testing them to see if they were stable enough to be carried. We were encouraged to think about how we could make our cake stronger, thinking about how we could join the pieces or stack the layers from largest to smallest.

Birthday maths was lots of fun. We looked at a numbered birthday card and counted the number of party favours into a party bag. We ordered birthday cards, and sorted party bags of mixed favours into groups and recorded the count. We decorated playdough cakes by rolling a die, showing the number on our fingers, then counted the candles to decorate our cake. Finally, we counted party images, crossing off as we counted and writing our stopping number when we finished.

Inspired by the naughty mice in the book Mouse Paint, the Bears explored colour mixing. First, we used ice cubes. We had four cups with ice cube combinations of red and blue, yellow and blue, red and yellow, and red, blue and yellow. The Bears made predictions using coloured pens to show which colour the combinations would become. Some of us were surprised by our results.
Next, a messy but fun way to explore colour as we played and mixed paint to create handprints. We loved it!

 

Next week, we celebrate a scarecrows' wedding.