Our topic book this week was The Magic Porridge Pot by Alan MacDonald. In the book we find out what happened when a magic pot won't stop cooking porridge! We follow the chaos as the porridge spills over the pot and into the whole town! The children loved this book and we had a lot of fun trying to predict what would happen next.
We reflected on the themes from the book in Circle Time and discussed how and when food is sometimes wasted and how some people don't have enough. We used this conversation to think about how it must feel to be hungry and linked this to the work of Mary’s Meals which is in organisation with provides children with one meal every day. We raised money for Mary’s Meals at the end of the week by having a porridge party. We measured, poured and mixed the porridge together before cooking and decorating it with various fruits which we used to create happy faces. Finally we were able to enjoy eating our porridge during Snack Time where we thought about healthy meals and discussed the things we enjoy eating which are healthy. The children then designed their own healthy plate of food using various materials such as bottle lids and tissue paper to create some wonderful 3D plates of nutritious food.
In other areas of the classroom the Squirrels enjoyed pretending to be police officers in the Role Play Area where they tried to catch the boy who had stolen the porridge pot in our story as well as working together to stop people for speeding. Even Sven the reindeer (from Frozen) was caught going too fast which landed him with a speeding ticket!
In Science we continued our focus on food by learning about food hygiene and bacteria. We used pepper and soap to demonstrate why it is so important to wash our hands which thoroughly grabbed the children’s attention. In this experiment we observed what happens to the pepper when soap was added and how it makes the pepper move versus when we just used water. They enjoyed this activity so much so we carried on exploring the experiment during Free Play the following morning.
We extended our role play in our Outdoor Learning Environment where we pretended to cook porridge using conkers, water and various cooking equipment and discussed the things we like to cook at home. We also explored Musical instruments and created wonderful symphonies as well as practising our number skills.
On our Outdoor Learning Day we continued the cooking theme by taking pots and pans with us. We used these in an activity where the Chicks were tasked with creating meals using special recipe cards. The had to forage for the ingredients on their cards, making sure to look closely at quantity and size such as “we need four long sticks and 7 small leaves.” Once we had all of our ingredients we discussed how much water we needed to add to our ingredients, referring back to our recipe and looking at capacity. We discussed the words empty, half full, full and overflowing. It has been a wonderfully engaging week with so much scope to extend our story in a million different ways.
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