As many of you know, we have been very fortunate to have had five ducklings in Nursery over the past two weeks. This has been a fantastic experience for the children as we waited for the eggs to hatch and wondered what would appear out of them – lizards, chicks, birds and dinosaurs were a few suggestions. The daily activities with the ducklings have generated many discussions around how we care for animals. We said goodbye to the ducklings yesterday morning as they were returned to their farm.
As part of our learning while the ducks were with us, we looked at the life cycle of a duck and we focused on the key vocabulary ‘egg’, ‘hatching’, ‘duckling’ and ‘duck’. We also thought about some questions we could ask to find out more about ducks.
This week is Science Week, and as well as learning about the life cycle of a duck, we have also been participating in a whole school investigation to find out about the height of the average child in each year group. We started by using our large building bricks and creating a tower that was the same height as each child. We then counted how many bricks we needed. We found out that we are not all the same height! Some of us are the same height as 13 bricks, some of us are 14 bricks tall and some of us used 15 bricks to build a tower the same height as us!
The grown ups then worked out the average height of the Nursery children and we drew around one of our children who was the same height as 14 bricks. We decorated our figure and cut it out ready for our whole school display!
How you can help at home
- Talk to your child about our ducklings – what key words do they remember? What did they enjoy most about having the ducklings stay in Nursery?
- Our sound this week is ‘g’ – what can they see around them that begins with ‘g’? Can they see the sound written in books that you share with them?
- Can you measure the height of people in your home? Who is the tallest? Who is the shortest?