PEEPO!

What have we noticed in the beautifully illustrated and nostalgic PEEPO (by Janet and Allan Ahlberg)? We spotted that, in the past (1940s), clothes were dried in front of the fire rather than in the tumble dryer or on the radiator. We noticed that there was a radio for entertainment rather than a big TV on the wall. Mummies slept in hair nets. The toilets were in the garden: that must have been handy when playing outside, wouldn’t it? Less so in the middle of the night. And the prams, well, how small were those wheels?! Beds, however, remain similar today, we still enjoy porridge for breakfast and we grow fruit and vegetables in gardens at home or at school.

We had fun guessing who was who in the baby photos so thank you for sending them in! The children talked about how they looked as a baby and how they look now. They considered what they can do now that they could not do as a baby. When we wrote about it, we tried very hard to remember our capital letters, finger spaces and full stops. We also noticed that, when we write about the past, there is often an ‘-ed’ on the end of the word, for example, played, looked, crawled, mashed (up food).

Why not ask older relatives what they recall from their childhood (if they don’t already delight in telling you!)?

Potting our beans

We have been so excited to observe the progress that our ‘beans in a bag’ have made over the last couple of weeks and we have been able to talk about the different parts of the plant. Can the children recall, for you, which part is the leaf, stem, bean and root? We also talked about the role of each of the parts of the plant before potting them in nutritious soil. The children understood that we will need to keep the plants hydrated and in the sunlight.