Handa's Surprise Fruit Tasting

This week in the EYFS we have been learning all about animals from the African Savanna. We have used two wonderful story books to support our learning: The Ugly Five by Julia Donaldson and Handa's Surprise by Eileen Browne.

While I would have loved to bring the animals from the stories to the classroom to enrich the children's learning, this was simply impossible so we settled for the next best thing - preparing and tasting the exotic fruits from the story 'Handa's Surprise'!

The children worked in their groups to prepare the fruit for their fellow classmates, they have peeled, chopped and sliced (using all the wonderful new equipment kindly donated to us by the Friends of East Farleigh!). The children were so sensible and worked hard on their knife skills.

The fruits they tried were: mango, avocado, pineapple, oranges and, although not from the story, pomegranate!

When the children were partaking in the fruit tasting they worked hard to come up with words to describe the taste and texture of the different fruits. We had lots of 'yummy' and 'nice' showing their enjoyment of this activity as well as 'sour', 'crunchy', 'sweet' and 'juicy'. This was an excellent opportunity for the children to develop their speaking and turn-taking skills.

We all agreed it was a fabulous afternoon, we thoroughly enjoy giving the children such enriching experiences.