It's all about stories!: Understanding the world

In April, we sent for a pack of seed potatoes to grow with the children. We had visions of enough potatoes appearing in the soil to have our own market stall outside - read on to see how it actually worked out...

Here's what we did -

We put the compost in the growing bag supplied
We planted the seed potatoes in the soil
We watered the soil
We checked on our potatoes to see how they were growing over a few weeks
The potatoes eventually grew flowers on the plants
We got the tuff spot ready to empty the potato plants in and find the potatoes
We dig in the soil for some potatoes
We find some potatoes in the soil
Here are the potatoes we found...

So I mentioned we thought we would have a huge harvest of potatoes - well here's what we got...

Links to the EYFS

Understanding the World "The World"
22-36 months - notices detailed features of objects in their environment
30-50 months - developing an understanding of growth, decay and changes over time
Mathematics "Shape, space and measure"
22-36 months - begins to use the language of size
30-50 months - uses positional language

We observed language such as "I found a little tiny one", "I found a big one", "Look, under the mud"

Sharing learning
We printed out the pictures with the numbers on above for each child's learning journey to share with parents. We added the links to the EYFS and things the children had said, along with next steps for each child such as, looking at a fact book about growing seeds, or using a digging in the sand activity to promote the use of positional and size language.

Stories about Growing

We've also been reading about growing and planting seeds. Jack and the Beanstalk was a favourite recently and we did this with story props - for the full post about this see here. We've also been looking at some other lovely picture books about growing -