Eggs, Assembly and the Easter Bunny.

Welcome to the butterfly blog! I hope you are all enjoying your holiday so far, and that the spring time snow hasn't ruined too many plans yet.

The last week of term in the butterfly classroom went at full speed, as always!

We have learnt about lots of different celebrations over the year, and we started this week by looking at the Jewish festival of passover. Mrs Creighton took the butterflies to the hall, and introduced the story of Moses to the children.

Some of the children volunteered to be the villains in this story, and Miss Whitelock explained to them how the Egyptians would have behaved and how we should act towards the rest of the class.

No smiling allowed! Get back to work!

Work harder!

Soon, the Jewish people got fed up of being bossed around and Moses set to work convincing the Pharaoh to let his people go. The Egyptians very convincingly shouted "NO!" each time. 

After the final plague, Pharaoh had no choice but to let the people go. The other Egyptians were not pleased and one butterfly told the Pharaoh; "we should trick them! We'll sneak up on them while they're asleep and take them back one by one!"  

Coming up to the Red Sea.

                                      

The miracle of passing through the sea after God parted the waves.

But the Egyptians didn't make it through.

The children were all fantastic. They really got into their roles and the story meant much more to them because of it. After an explanation of slavery, a butterfly came to me very worried to say "My Mummy is a slave! She has to work all the time and no one pays her!"  

When we got back to the classroom we shared the Matzah bread. When the Jewish people fled Eygpt they had to rush away quickly, and the bread was pulled out of the over before it could rise. At passover, Jewish people cook Matzah bread to strict timings to remember the plight of their ancestors. A recipe can be found  here.

Every single butterfly tasted the bread and talked about their experience with their friends.

Another day, another celebration! It was time to start thinking about Easter in preparation for our assembly! We started by making giant cardboard eggs, following the Victorian tradition. We experimented with different textures by mixing things into our paints and talking about how it felt!

We painted handwriting patterns on to giant eggs. It was fun to sit on the floor and paint.

We used our fine motor skills to weave patterns onto Easter eggs, to make beautiful decorations for our Easter tree.

Everyone was busy painting flowers! The butterflies really looked carefully at what they were painting and tried to make their picture look just right, well done butterflies!

Even with all of our preparation for assembly, we still made sure to have time for maths and phonics. We've made more time for guided reading, where the children share a story together as a group, talking about what might happen, and developing their understanding of the language of story books.

In maths, some butterflies started counting with money.

Others have been working on learning one more than, and one less than, through jumping games and stories.

A lot of our children are kinaesthetic learners and learn best through practical activities, so we painted a giant sun made of shapes! The children have got very good at answering "but how do you know it's a triangle?" by describing the properties of different 2d shapes.

Then finally, all of our work came together for our assembly!

We were so quick getting up on the stage! Well done butterflies!

"Woooop!" the sun eventually comes up and the flowers grow!

Well done butterflies! What a super show! 

The rest of the day was taken up by treats! The butterflies certainly deserved it after all their rehearsing.

We found a mysterious letter in the going home box.. after some investigation we realised that none of the grown ups had put it there... so who could it be from?

Lets follow the clues and see!

What's this?!

The Easter Bunny has left us a treat!

jumping for joy at the thought of more chocolate!

The butterflies came back to the classroom and had chocolate eggs, and another gigantic chocolate cake! Thank you very much to the grown ups who keep sending in treats! Our butterflies are very lucky.

We all hope that your butterflies have enjoyed this term. It's been a lot of fun for us, and we all finished with big smiles on our faces.

Thank you again for your continued support. I think some of you noticed me trying to sneakily count how many people came to our assembly and I was very impressed!

Enjoy your holidays, and we hope to see you feeling relaxed and refreshed after Easter.

When we come back, we will start a topic on growing and spring, and will finally make our tent.

Goodbye and toodle-oo!