Happy Wednesday Everybody!

What are we learning today?

We've been reading We're Going on a Bear Hunt this week. There are lots and lots of stories about bears. With your grown-up, think about any bear stories that you may have read or have on your bookshelf. I know there are many different ones! People must like reading and writing about bears! Today I'm going to share with you one of my favourite traditional story about bears. See if you can guess what story it is. Here are some clues...

• There are three bears in this story.
• One of the characters is a little girl with golden hair.
• The story is set in a forest.
• All of the characters like eating porridge!

Can you guess? This story may be one you know well or it may be new to you.

Here's a video of Ms Paulson reading it to the nursery children last summer. I hope you enjoy it. Find a teddy bear of your own to sit and listen to the story with.

Talking Together

I hope you enjoyed that story, I know I enjoyed telling it to you! Now you’ve listened to the story, take some time to talk together about what happened.

• What do you think about what Goldilocks did in the story?
• Do you think she was right to go into the bears’ house without being invited? Do you think she should have eaten the porridge, sat on their chairs (breaking one!) and gone to sleep in their beds?
• I wonder if Goldilocks felt sorry for what she had done?
• If she did, what could she do to put things right?

Mathematics

Goldilocks is another story where characters come in sets of three - just like in The Three Billy Goats Gruff last week! There is something else that is the same in both stories- the three bears and the three goats are different sizes, one small, one medium-sized and one large! Can you make collections of three things from around your house or your garden and order them by size from the smallest to the biggest? For example, 3 shoes, 3 socks, 3 stones, 3 leaves, 3 bottles, 3 boxes and so on. Talk about their size using comparative language such as smaller than, bigger than, shortest, tallest, biggest and smallest.

Busy Fingers

I love porridge and I had some for my breakfast this morning! I like porridge with raspberries and blueberries on top. Do you like porridge? What do you like on your porridge? Maybe honey or banana or just on its own.  Why don’t you have a go at making some porridge? Porridge is made from oats that grow in the fields. It’s really easy but you need a grown-up to help you because you need to cook the oats with water or milk to make them creamy and ready to eat.

Porridge Play 

If you have a few spare oats, fill a shallow tray with dry porridge oats and put out a variety of different containers and implements such as scoops and different sized spoons. Invite your child to play at making some porridge for the three bears. Who will have the biggest bowl? Let them experiment with the different containers. Can they count how many spoons it Takes to fill each bowl or pot? Can they give and follow instructions such as, ‘Put four big spoons of oats in this bowl and then add 2 more’ and so on. At the end provide some small bottles of water and let your child observe the changes when they add water to dry oats.