The Enormous Turnip
We began our new topic All Creatures Great and Small, with the Russian folk tale The Enormous Turnip. In role play, we have shopped and worked in a farm shop, learning about vegetables and farm shop products while developing our concept of money, creating price labels and working a cash till. On small world, we recreated a farm scene with the story characters, and the Bears were encouraged to sequence and use time language when retelling the story.
We listened to different versions of the story. Then the Bears worked together to act out and sequence the events to pull an enormous turnip from the ground. On our writing table, we used our phonics to label a picture of the characters pulling the enormous turnip from the ground. We noticed the use of an exclamation mark when the characters were speaking. So we choose one of the characters from the story and wrote a speech bubble of what they would say, using an exclamation mark to show surprise, excitement or to show that the character was shouting.
On our green table, we explored different vegetables, and used our senses to describe and name them. We washed and chopped vegetables to make a vegetable soup. Then we tasted our soup with mixed reactions. Some of us loved it, others not as much.
Pulling an enormous turnip from the ground and moving it is a challenge, so we used our construction materials to build models to help the characters.
On the creative table, we produced vegetable garden art by building a scene showing root vegetables growing under and above the ground. First, we created a blue sky with watercolour paint, then painted a brown soil background. Next, we drew a carrot, beetroot and an onion and coloured our vegetables with pastels. We cut out our vegetables and stuck them onto our painted garden. Finally, we added string roots to our vegetable patch.
Outside, we cared for our bean and sunflower seedlings, and worked out a way to water our plants in a different way. We have been digging, washing and weighing vegetables, and making vegetable soup in our mud kitchen.
Our next story character is very hungry and would love to munch his way through our vegetables. It is of course, the Very Hungry Caterpillar.