Tinker Table Workbench

Over the last few months the children in the Discovery room have been practising their skills at the Tinker Table work bench.  The children have learned the rules of the Tinker Table and why these rules are very important to follow for their safety.  They created a rule book for the Tinker Table work bench to encourage them and others to put on gloves and safety goggles when using the tools in the tool box.

The children have been learning to use hammers and saws properly as well as learning that there are different types of saws and hammers used for different jobs.  The claw hammer has been popular for creating pieces using nails as well as the children learning that the claw can remove nails. The children’s saw skills have really flourished as they now know how to hold the hacksaw properly and use their body weight to make the saw move through the wood.

With the children’s skills improving at the work bench so too did their understanding of how to better construct their creations. The children decided that they wanted to introduce glue to the Tinker Table and with that came wonderfully creative pieces.

The children have now progressed on to drawing a plan first of what they would like to create. They are looking online at images, drawing it, then thinking of how to create it with the resources at the Tinker Table.

A wonderful plan producing a fabulous rocket.

The children’s pieces have all been displayed in the Tinker Table Gallery for several months now. The children decided that they wanted to close the gallery in December and take their exhibits home to stay.  I hope you are looking forward to seeing how creative your child has been at the Tinker Table workbench this year.

Bookbug came to visit today🥰


Bookbug came to visit the boys and girls today, one of our favourite songs is ‘Hello everyone’

We chose our special friends from the magic bag and sang Incey Wincey Spider, Twinkle twinkle Little Star and Humpty Dumpty. Bookbug was so pleased with the lovely singing, he joined the rest of the toys with a bounce on the Lycra… Thanks everyone!

We then enjoyed a lovely story called Good Manners and we chatted about our own good manners we have.

To finish we all had a little dance to Christmas songs our very favourite was Jingle Bells 🔔
What a fun Friday we had!

Exploring and developing our garden!

Today in our garden we have been super busy! The children have worked hard as team to create a fairy garden! Firstly they painted the wooden logs their favourite colour, we then explored the garden to see what other resources we could use then got started, creating it all by themselves using a variety of natural loose parts, Well done!






The children then decided they’d like to make a potion made from a mixture of water, mud, acorns , grass and leaves.  They had lots of fun!

The mud kitchen is a very popular area in our garden. It is an exciting, messy and creative area to play in. The children experience sensory and imaginative play as well as developing skills in numeracy, science, interaction and communication. I wonder what they will make next time! 

It’s Christmas time!!

Today the children got into the Christmas spirit when we made Gingerbread people! We explored different smells and textures when baking our cookies, and our favourite one was the “ginger” and “sticky golden syrup”. It was quite tricky at first to mix as the mixture was very tough for our little muscles, but with good team work, we managed to make a nice yummy dough. We developed our muscles some more rolling the dough nice and flat and cutting out our shapes.

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When the gingerbread people had cooled down, we explored our fine motor skills by decorating them with some fancy buttons and happy faces. Some children even made a “skirt” and “big muscles”.

Musical Mornings

Today in the Studio Room we had a very special musical morning. Our music teacher Lindsey came to show us some instruments and play musical games with us.
First we warmed up by standing up and singing and joining in with reindeer Hokey Cokey.
We sang a variety of other songs using our voices to sing and our bodies to join in with the actions.


We had good fun learning new songs some of us hadn’t heard before and playing new musical games.
We did sing a few Christmas songs we had already been practicing so it was nice to show Lindsey how well we have been learning our songs.

Lindsey brought some scarfs for us to use to take part in snowball dancing. We enjoyed using our expressive movements.

Then we got to choose which instruments we wanted to use from Lindsays collection that she brought along for us. There was a lot to choose from.

We played a game of Simon says, using the musical instrument. It was lots of fun and we had to listen out for the instructions.

We all really enjoyed our musical morning, learning new skills to broaden our expressive arts.
We are looking forward to next week to see what else Lindsey will teach us.

Chrome books

The children have been learning about different types of technology recently so we thought it would be a good idea to introduce Chromebooks. First of all we spoke about staying safe online and always have an adult with you when you are searching for information.


We then discussed what they know about chrome books and also what we would use them for.

“It’s like a tablet and a computer”

” we use them to watch videos and play games”

”that looks like my tablet at home”


We spoke about what we would like to use the Chrome books for and decided that we would like to find out some more information about our favourite animals..

Cats and parrots were the most popular 🐱 🦜 so we went online to see what we could find out.

We used the keyboard to search for information, recognising some of the letters in our names as we typed.


We found out lots of information about parrots
“there are lots of different colours of parrot and some even talk”
Then we looked for information about cats
“boy cats are called tom”

We found out lots of new information about our favourite animals which we saved. We can’t wait to show our friends what we found out and how to use the chrome books.

It’s beginning to look like Christmas

The children received a lovely surprise when they arrived this morning. Yesterday two beautiful Christmas Trees were delivered. One for the front door and the other placed in the Home Room.

The children said it looked very bare and asked if they could decorate it. They found the box of decorations and picked out the ornaments they would like to put on.

Look, I like this star
I have a bell

The children also found some tinsel and some lights.

The children noticed that some of the branches were white and it looked like snow!

A star on the top completes their tree.

Our wonderful decorators!

‘All it needs now is some presents!’

After the tree was finished the children decided to make festive play dough. They used red and green glitter to make it sparkle.

M made her own wee Christmas tree with a star on the top just like the one in our Home Room.

The children are now getting excited about the big day.

Christmas Writing

Today in the home room the children have been developing their mark making and early writing skills by selecting their own materials to write with.

The children have been so excited about Christmas and asked to write some Christmas words, which they were able to copy carefully.

 

We drew some pictures of the words we had written. We then decided to draw some beautiful glittery rainbows to take home.

We were so good at taking turns and sharing resources with our friends.

 

 

 

Ahoy ship!

The children in the Studio today created a fantastic story which started with a cardboard box .

The cardboard box became a boat and then the sea was added using a blue piece of material.

Pink material was wrapped around and suddenly there was a fish in the sea with the boat.  Then some brightly coloured mermaids joined  the gathering.


Next a crab with great big claws came to join the sea travellers.


The fish, mermaids and crab danced around the ship and the ship’s captain shouted “Ahoy ship!” and the fish said “We are swimming to America!”

The children’s role play recorded in this observation was truly creative.  They used the materials around them creatively, they worked as a team to tell the imaginative story and they directed each other’s movements like actors in a play.

“Play is the highest form of research” said Albert Einstein and we can’t agree more.