Come Outside - The Tiny Seed
The Bears were introduced to the story of The Tiny Seed written by Eric Carle. The Tiny Seed is a beautifully descriptive book that describes the journey of a seed as it survives through the seasons, to grow into a giant flower. In our small world, we retold the journey of the tiny seed as it moved through different environments.
On our creative table we recreated the cover of The Tiny Seed book. First, we created a colourful splatter background using toothbrushes. Then we added a green crepe paper stem with leaves, tissue paper petals and a circular centre to our flower with a seed pattern printed with cotton buds.
On our practical table we built a flower picture using the parts of real flowers and some natural collage materials. We looked closely at flowers and their parts and sorted them into roots, stems, leaves, petals and flowers. We used our new plant vocabulary to label the parts of a flowering plant.
We explored the art of Van Gogh and looked closely at a sunflower plant to observe, then draw with charcoal, pastels and paint. We created a sunflower lifecycle, and we hoped to watch our own sunflower lifecycle by planting sunflower seeds. We wrote instructions on how to plant a sunflower seed.
We were gardeners inside the classroom too - building flowers and flower beds from parts of real flowers, loose parts, playdough, 2D shapes and different construction materials.
Inspired by Eric Carle's colour and pattern collage techniques, we created a tulips and sprinkles picture. We started by painting patterned paper in greens, pinks, oranges and purples. Then, we cut the green paper to create stems, and drew and cut tulip shapes on the other colours. We stuck these to an A4 landscape piece of card, then added our sprinkles using the toothbrush method we had learnt. I love this artwork - the pictures are gorgeous!
In our outside florist shop, the Bears were busy with flowers, brown wrapping paper and pencils and tags to write messages. We created a bouquet and chose a friend to receive it. We even had our very own bike flower delivery service. We created perfume with water, petals and a pestle and mortar, and drew flowers on our chalkboards. We also developed a bird watching den area, looking for birds with our binoculars made from cardboard tubes, wool and tape. We made some tasty treats to encourage the birds to pay us a visit and ticked off the birds we saw on our bird spotter sheets.
Next time, the Bears tackle the problem of an enormous turnip!