Monthly Archives: October 2021

Expressive Arts

Pumpkin 🎃 Fun

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The children are very excited as it’s nearly Halloween đŸ‘». Today we listened to a story about Pumpkin Jack, a boy who had a Halloween pumpkin. After Halloween he put the pumpkin in the garden and over time the pumpkin began to rot away into the ground. The following year he watched a stalk grow from the ground and the leaves got bigger and bigger and a new pumpkin grew and was ready to use again for another Halloween.

The children had a look at our own pumpkins. We had different sizes, shapes and colours. We discussed how some were heavier than others, the smaller ones were bumpy and rough and the bigger ones were smooth and soft. The pumpkins felt cold and smelled like “pumpkins and witches“.

The children then designed their own pumpkin pictures This helped develop their creativity and fine motor skills using our art resources. They were able to choose their own art materials to create great pumpkin pictures. Well done.

Next week we are going to open the pumpkins and look inside!!!!. What do you think we will discover?

Outdoor Learning

Water mixtures!

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Today in the garden the children had great fun at the water area! They used the hose to fill up bottles and jugs! They each added a different colour of food colouring to their water using pipettes to see what happened! This helps to develop their fine motor skills.

“The water is all blue!”

”My water has all orange swirls!”

The children thought it would be fun to mix colours together! They added the blue food colouring to the orange water!
”Its turned green!!!”

The blue food colouring was added to the red! “It’s made purple!!!”

The children then just had fun pouring all the  different coloured water into different jugs and tubs and finding out what colours they could make!
“They all make brown!!”

What amazing colour mixing and colour recognition!

Uncategorized

All things Autumn

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Today in our toddler garden we have been super busy. The children have been very interested in pumpkins. Some of the children have been talking about seeing them in the shops, in their homes and within our nursery. So today we have came up with a brilliant idea to plant our very own pumpkin seeds.

“I have this big pumpkin at home, I made it into a ghost”

The children were very engaged today exploring the autumn provocation, filled with lots of loose parts and different sizes, colours and textures of pumpkins. The children were asking where pumpkins come from and why there are different colours, so this is where we got the idea to grow our own.

“we water them, they grow so big”

Here we are, super busy digging and planting the seeds, the children said that we must come out and water our seeds everyday to make them grow big.

Expressive Arts

Pumpkin Playdough!

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Today, the boys and girls have been discussing Halloween and the things associated with it.
We had a look at some pumpkins online and some we had at Cart Mill. We discussed the different shapes and colours.

After discussing the pumpkins, the children decided they wanted to make their own pumpkins,  so we thought we would make some orange pumpkin playdough!

We even added in some cinnamon!

Once the playdough was made, it was time to create our own pumpkins


Digital Technology

Forwards and backwards with the bee bots🐝

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This morning in the discovery room the children decided to make a track for the bee bots to move around on.

They used different shaped blocks to create a track that was flat enough for the bee bots to move along .
We looked at the arrows on top and discussed what they mean.

”This button means forward”

”what is this one mean?”

“backwards backwards”


The children used the direction cards and placed them along the track.

“Let’s  go forward like this card”

”The green one is go”


They used their numeracy skills as they counted how many times they  pressed the forwards button and how many places the bee moved forward.

In the end they raced the bees to see who would move the furthest, it was a lot of fun cheering on the bees.

 

Outdoor Learning

We’re going on an autumn hunt đŸŒ±đŸŒżđŸ‚đŸ

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The toddlers decided to go for a walk and to keep ourselves safe we had a chat about our safety rules, holding hands and listening to the adults. As we were crossing a road, we had to be extra careful to look and listen at the side of the road.

On our walk we had to look up, down and all around. We looked at all the autumn colours of the leaves and we collected the leaves that had fallen on the ground in our special bags. We listened to the birds and saw a squirrel but it was too fast for us to take a photo 😁

After we collected our leaves we played hide and seek, had some races and saw a most interesting van that came off its back wheels and stretched nearly to the moon 😳

We then brought all our autumn goodies back to nursery where the children enjoyed decorating their autumn bags with their leaves. Some chose to paint and we shared them with our friends who may not have been able to come on our walk. We transferred our leaves to the playdough where the children were leaf printing.

Autumn is here and is providing glorious colours, textures, temperatures for us all to enjoy 😁

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Super Soup!

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Our Cart Mill children have been thoroughly enjoying our new lunch regime. We are very excited about our new lunch menu and we have been tasting lots of delicious  new foods.

One our favourites is Stephanie’s super lentil soup. It is so yummy!

Pouring our own water helps us develop our measuring skills  and promotes independence . We are very careful not to spill any! We are also very good at turn taking and passing the jug carefully around the table.

Sitting around the table together helps us develop our language and communication skills. We love to discuss what foods keep us healthy and can recognise and name our favourite fruit and vegetables and discuss our likes and dislikes!

“I like cucumber, do you want some?”
”I like the red pepper, I don’t like the green”

We also further developed our fine motor skills by using the tongs to select our own crudités.

We love to help tidy up and practise resetting our table for our friends to have their lunch!

“We need to clean the table. Then we need a bowl and spoon for our soup”

“I’ll put the water and vegetable tray out”

Our super soup got a big thumbs up today!

“I’m finished. It was so yummy!”

 

 

 

 

Expressive Arts

Musical mornings!

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Today was a musical morning at Cart Mill. We have been learning all about percussion. We have learned that a percussion instrument is an instrument that makes a sound when it is hit, shaken or scraped. We have been using our information sheet to help us learn which instruments are part of the percussion section.
We had a look in our instruments baskets and picked the percussion instrument we wanted to play.

The xylophone was the most popular choice and we all took turns playing it.

We discussed how each instrument should be played. Do we hit, shake or scrape them?

Next we experimented with the sounds each instrument made. Was it a loud sound? Was it a nice sound?

We discussed pitch, rhythm and tempo. We played our percussion instruments fast, slow, and softly.

We followed the instructions of the conductor just like in an orchestra so that we knew when to play.

We sang songs and made our very own Cart Mill percussion band.
What other instruments can you think of that are percussion instruments?

Expressive Arts, Literacy

Book Bug fun!

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The children in the 3-5 room have been engaged in different rhyming experiences this week, and have shown an interest in a variety of rhyming nursery songs and story books too. We have been talking about words that “sound the same at the end” and what that means. We have had lots of fun games like “find the rhyme”. Maybe you could play something like this at home! Start by finding an object, and try to find a word that sounds the same at the end (or rhymes). Some examples we had in nursery were “sock” and “rock” or “spoon” and “moon”. It can be as simple or as complicated as you want 🙂

We have been enjoying our rhyming and singing nursery rhymes so much that Book Bug even came for a visit to hear it!! We look forward to hearing what rhyming objects you can find over the weekend 🙂