This week as part of our NELI programme, we have read the story Jack and the Beanstalk and learnt the words, decide, swap, follow and yell. The children have loved this story and have enjoyed talking about the key events at the beginning, middle and end of the story. Some of the children have also been eager to retell the whole book using pictures as prompts and the using the puppets to act out the story.

In our outdoor area a child found a bean which was a fabulous provocation for extending the children’s learning. We imagined that it was a magic bean and planted it before climbing up the enormous beanstalk that grew. Our favourite part however, was being chased away by the giant shouting ‘fee fi fo fun’ at us!. The children were excellent at recalling key events from the story and using the story language, ‘fee, fi, fo fum’.

After planting our bean plants a couple of weeks ago, we used the story as a stimulus to check on the growth of the plants. We used the language of size, taller and shorter to measure and describe their growth. We noticed that one plant was the tallest and the shortest one had very few leaves on it.