On our recent inservice day we have created a more defined room with easily accessible areas. In our construction area we have been looking at deconstructed den building using different sizes and shaped boxes. Children started to create houses and different buildings to scaffold this learning materials were introduced to enhance their curiosity.
We are renovating our home corner to include more items that are familiar from home, currently creating our own family wall. Continuing with their interest in real every day items we have added different textures and smells such as lemons, limes and daffodils. We will slowly added new items which link with our home life as we develop our interests in taking care of living things.
The children and staff have been looking at different ways to communicate. In our room we have lots of visual aids to help support us as we look after our toys and resources. Claire has been introducing makaton (hand signs) for our everyday routine. We have learned milk, water, yes, no and plate. We will continue to strengthen our makaton vocabulary as the staff support children with signing everyday.
Our tuff tray has allowed us to develop our fine motor skills as we explore the coloured rice and boxes. Filling, pouring and shaking the materials and using these movements provide opportunities to extend our mathematical language such as bigger, smaller, more, less, fast and slow.
The children have been expressing their thoughts, on which book to choose for the month of March.
We took part in voting from a choice of three books and
“Gorilla Loves Vanilla” was the most popular. This will be our book of the month.
World Book Day, the children brought in a variety of interesting stories and dressed for the occasion. We read all of the stories, the children talked about some of the characters and what bits of the story they liked.
In the Art area we have been looking at our new ‘Mix it up’ book that teaches us about paint changing colour when mixed together. We have now decided to create our own paint mixing chart to remind us when we’re painting at the easel. The children have also been busy making cupcakes out of brown coloured play dough. Using our new colour mixing skills we added red and then green paint and were amazed to see the flour mixture turn a deep shade of chocolate brown.We weighed, squished and rolled the dough before baking in the oven.
We have had lots of fun in the garden recently. We have been developing our risk assessing skills through lots of opportunities for risky play in our large loose parts area. Also we have been enjoying using sand in our mud kitchen creating lots of food and potions.
