Today we talked and found out about St George’s day. We listened to the story and some of the children shared about places they had been to celebrate. Some of the children chose to make shields during independent learning time.

It has been wonderful to see how caring and respectful the children have been during the hatching process. They remembered the importance of observing and not touching! We talked about how the chicks hatch and how they had an ‘egg tooth’ at the end of their beaks to help. The children could see this on the chicks too! On Wednesday, the children were lucky enough to witness chick number three being hatched which was an incredible experience. We ended the week with 8 chicks- two boys and six girls. The children learnt that to be able to tell if they are boys or girls, they had to look at the feather colouring. The brownish coloured chicks are the girls and the bright yellow are the boys.
Sadly two of the chicks did not hatch but we will sensitively talk to the children about  this tomorrow as an important part of life.
Next week, we hope to get the children more involved in a hands on way with caring for the chicks. They will be cleaning the brooder box, feeding the chicks and hopefully being able to hold them if they are happy for it to happen.

When we learnt about the incubator, we found out that there needed to be two trays of water in the bottom to help keep the environment ‘humid’. When Mrs Garraway was topping up the trays she heard the sound of tweeting coming from the eggs. Some of the children were able to hear it too before we quickly put the top back on to make sure they all stayed warm. We hope that we will start to meet some of chicks really soon now!

Today we had a special arrival in Reception. Ten eggs all ready to hatch! We talked about the life cycle of chicks and the incubator that they were in to help them stay warm. The children (and the staff!) are all very excited for a magical two weeks.

Today we started our bean seed experiment. We followed the instructions and made a prediction about what we thought would happen. We put one bean in a bag with a wet paper towel and one in a bag without a wet paper towel. We then taped it to the classroom window. We are all excited to see what will happen to the bean seeds. Maybe they will turn into our own beanstalk!

As part of our learning about Lunar New Year, we made and tried a vegetable stir fry. The children helped us to follow the instructions and listened carefully to the sounds the ingredients made as they were added to the pan. The children then took a visit to the Apley Wood Chinese restaurant where they tried the stir fry that we made along with prawn crackers on the side.