This has been a very busy term. During the first week we 'Ate Dallington' as part of the 'Eat London' event. We decided we should make the swimming pool as one of our significant buildings. After discussing various options it was decided that spongecake and blue jelly would make a good pool with jelly babies as swimmers. We weighed ingredients, creamed butter and sugar, mixed in the flour and eggs and baked two tray bake sponges. A great deal of careful measuring of flavoured vegetarian gelatine and another traybake tin produced blue jelly. Waffles were iced to look like tiles around the pool. After a break for lunch the various parts were assembled and the swimmers dived in. The next day we ate it.

Growing and Life Cycles

We have been lucky enough to have a tank of frogspawn which we have watched turn into tadpoles, then froglets and finally frogs. We used our observations to make a wall display of the life cycle of a frog. In the small world area we created a pond for our plastic tadpoles and frogs, using gravel stones, rocks and lily pads. We had great fun creating stories.
During the term, we have planted seeds and are growing tomatoes, cucumbers, sunflowers, broadbeans and runner beans. The runner bean plants have also produced a life cycle wall display.

The potatoes we planted in February are nearly ready to be harvested and we are hoping to find lots and lots in our bucket. Our next life cycle will be the butterfly and we are eagerly awaiting our special parcel from the postman which will contain tiny newly hatched 'Painted Lady Caterpillars'.

All these plants and animals growing has helped us to become more aware of every datail. We have used magnifying glasses, factual books to look up information, the internet to look up pictures and looked at and read the many stories about growing. We have created special environments for the frogs, beans, snails and the rest of the plants. We have kept count of the tadpoles,the height of our beans, the length of our cucumbers and, hopefully, the weight of our potatoes. During gym we even hopped like frogs, slithered like slugs and snails and danced like butterflies. As we had so many ideas we decided to turn the role play area into a garden centre so we could make plants and flowers with various materials, paint some lovely flowers and create a shop. We can buy sunflowers for only £1.