Handa's Surprise, Oliver's Fruit Salad and making clay pots

a very fruity salad

Handa's Surprise by Eileen Browne has been a wonderful book to look at. Through this book we have looked at many different aspects of the curriculum. The children have loved joining in with the story. The story is about a little girl who carries fruit in a basket on her head. She is going to surprise her friend Akeyo. Little does she know that the fruit is gradually being taken away by various animals. Towards the end of the story when her basket is empty a goat charges into the tree and a huge amount of tangerines fall into the basket! She takes this to Akeyo who declares that tangerines were her favourite fruit. This is a huge surprise for Handa!!
We are making our own group book, looking at what happens at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.

We followed this story about friut with another book called 'Oliver's Fruit Salad' by Vivian French and Alison Bartlet. In this story Oliver does not really like friut but seemed to change his mind when a wonderful fruit salad was made.

All this talking about fruit made us want to make our own fruit salad.!


This term we have spent lots of time investigating different malleable materials such as plasticine, playdough and clay. During this process we discovered that some children were very interested in making pots and baskets etc, so we all had a go. To begin with we practised making pots with plasticine and then we moved on to using clay.
For the clay pots we had to roll the clay very carefully into long thin strips. This was then wound around in a spiral shape. We had to be very careful not to break them!

After the clay had dried we used many different colours to decorated our pots. To finish off we used a glaze to protect the paint.
rolling clay, painting the pots and the finished items