Nursery have been focusing on the book Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell, for the past two weeks!
We have been looking at Dear Zoo throughout our Literacy, Maths and Expressive Arts and Design activities. Nursery have loved looking at this book, and we have enjoyed exploring it in many different ways over the past weeks.
In Maths, we have been looking at all of the different animals, the shape and size of the animals and how many legs they have. We focused initially on guessing which animal arrived in which box, and how we could guess this by looking at the shape and size of both the animals and the boxes delivered from the Zoo. Nursery did a great job at matching up all of the animals with their boxes, practicing their fine motor skills by drawing a line with a pencil independently.
Nursery have loved the ‘lift the flap’ aspect of Dear Zoo so we incorporated this into our Maths activities. Creating an A4 sized book, so the children can lift each flap to see how many animals are underneath! They were challenged to count up to 10 animals, and asked if they could also count each leg or tail of the animals too!
Throughout Literacy activities we have been reading the book as a class and in small groups. The children have loved learning the story well enough to join in with refrains of ‘so I sent him back!’ and learning the order of the animals arriving from the zoo. We have made actions for each page, to help the children remember the animals, their characteristics; too heavy, too tall, too jumpy, and the noises each animal makes.
In Expressive Arts and Design we chose our favourite animals from the story – the Lion, and created our own Lion masks to wear! The children loved this activity, cutting and sticking the strips of paper for their Lion mane.
