Super cool snails !

Today in reception we were very pleased to welcome Mr Tibbetts from MMU's Primary Science department to help us with our learning all about snails. He showed us his garden snails and his large African land snail, Simba and we learned some super cool facts:

Did you know that the fastest snail in the world travelled 6.60 meters in 1 hour.

And that the largest land snail was recorded in 1979, called Gee Geronimo. He was 39 cm long and weighed 900 g.

We got to look closely at Simba and observe that the spiral markings on his shell go in a clockwise direction like most of the snail population in the world. There are only a few that have left or anti clockwise spirals !

I think Mr Tibbetts was impressed by our knowledge and understanding about minibeasts as we were able to show off some of the facts we knew already by answering key questions about their features and what they like and don't like to eat.

We were very excited about the snail race but sadly our snails were slightly less so. We gave them a good 20 minutes, whilst we had a story about a whale and a snail, and lots of encouragement and finally our winner was number 16, who managed to cross the starting line.

It was such a lovely way to finish off our week that has been packed full of learning. In Literacy we have been retelling the story of The Very Busy Spider, focusing on the repetitive nature of the text. As we loved making acrostic poems about minibeast so much last week we continued with alliteration poems about spiders this week.
Here is one of our favourites by Oliver:

Shy spiders spinning
silky webs.
Strong safe spinning
spiders.
Secret spiders keeping
spider eggs safe.

In mathematics we looked at subtracting numbers using objects to secure our learning and then when we became confident, we used a number line and 100 square to count back. We can now subtract two digit numbers from each other. Wow !

In arts and design we have looked at the delicate construction of a spiders web and tried to recreate them with silky silver threads on black card. They look very effective.

Have a restful weekend
Kindest regards
Mrs Taylor