This week the children have chosen butterflies. In the craft area they made beautiful butterfly puppets out of lots of different colours and then using their whole bodies they flew them around in the garden. This theme has developed into learning about the life cycle of butterfly , reading different stories, dance to music with scarves pretending to be caterpillars and butterflies, sang caterpillar songs and even looked for bugs in the garden.
Through the butterfly theme, the children have also been developing their understanding for different colours like butterfly wings, he have created a range of free play activities to encourage this such as sorting coloured Pom Poms, colour paint mixing, playing with giant coloured bricks, coloured puzzles, books about colour and even in the water tray the children played with cornflakes and coloured Pom Pom so develop their language skills such as modelling, ‘crunchy’ ,‘scooping’, ‘mixing’, ‘pouring’ and even ‘stomping.’
Later on in the week, we continued to celebrate Chinese New Year. The children used a variety of creative tools to decorate their Chinese New Year pictures, looking at the similarities and differences in the different cultures, we had Chinese tea in the water tray, and we set up a Chinese dining room in the role play with play spaghetti and noodles to practise using chop sticks.
This week we also used the tubes in the garden to make ramps to experiment what would be best to roll down them, the children tried a variety of items and they ended using the plastic balls as they went fast. On Friday morning we laid on our backs and read a few books together, relaxing but this led to the children building their confidence and taking about their likes and dislike. The children also enjoyed playing with the giant box of barbies that was donated by a member of staff and encourage lots of different play.
Hope you all have a great weekend, and look forward to hearing all about it next week.
This week we have been learning all about Chinese new year, we have done lot of different activities such as making lucky envelopes, drawing in red sand, playing with red noodles and practising our scissors skills and waiting our turn to make Chinese lanterns.
We have also been enjoying discovering all the ice in the garden, we have been collecting it from all different places and discovering what will happen to it if they use different tools on it, talking about the different shapes, where it came from (we had some fantastic ideas) and textures. We also went around the garden collecting different natural items such as pinecones, sage leaves, grass and leaves that had already fallen and then we used the water from the water butt to fill up the containers, we placed them onto a shelf to see what would happen if we left them out in the cold. We will find out on Wednesday morning.
Today was Winnie the Pooh’s birthday so to celebrate we had a teddy bears picnic for snack time, we decorated some chocolate cakes this afternoon and at circle time we read a story about Winnie the Pooh. The children were able to develop lots of skills through this, talking about celebrations, colours, counting, listening and attention, fine motor skills and they then wanted to then take this into their play and have their own pretend picnic developing their language and social skills.
Also throughout the sessions we have been practising lots of different skills such as sorting, pen control with varies tools and even make believing with a pony farm stable in the tuff tray.
Children have been very busy this week, so far they have shown an interest in the walkie talkies and this then developed into some role play about police, we made paper cup telephones, dressed up and then made a huge police car out of junk modelling, where we talked about shapes, colours, different job roles of people that help us and working together.
We also have been practising lots of fine motor skills this week, by using their hands to do different tasks such as pairing socks on the washing line, tracing out letters with pencils and grippers, playing with alphabets stamps and also ordering and sizing of counting teddy bears and of course lots of painting!