Scottish Inventors

To celebrate St Andrews Day we are learning about Scottish inventors in the discovery room this week. We started by asking “What is an inventor?”

  • ”It’s someone who builds lots of stuff.”
  • “They make robots.”
  • “An inventor makes stuff.”

Then we learned about Henry Faulds who invented finger printing. We discussed what we know about fingerprints, what they can be used for and what makes each one unique.

  • “Police use them to catch baddies.”
  • ”We use them for mysteries.”
  • ”There’s hundreds of little lines.”
  • ”It means you’re not the same.”

Then we used our ink and made our own prints.

We also examined them through the telescope to see all the lines and whirls better.

“I’m making a picture with mine.”

Next we learned about Sir Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and had a great time making our own phones.

We discovered that the string had to be pulled as tight as possible or the sound will not travel to the receiver. We experimented with different lengths of string and found the longer the piece, the better the sound.

Excellent work from our own little inventors!

Today in the discovery room we were mostly building bridges😁

The children decided they would like to learn a little about all of the different types of bridges. We used the Promethean board to research them and printed some pictures of famous bridges to use as inspiration to build our own.
We worked well together to create our bridge. “Look this block is the same shape as the bridge” “We are building  London Bridge”  
🎶 London bridge is falling down falling down falling down my fair lady 🎶
 

“ Let’s use this blue material for the water”

“ can we have some music to have a party on our bridge “

”My bridge is for monster trucks “

“ I need to use two smaller blocks to make up the size of the bigger ones because there are none left” Great problem solving!

”My bridge lights up when it’s dark” “ It even has handles to stop you falling over into the water”

“Pizza delivery for the party on the bridge “  
The children had lots of fun role playing on their bridges.

Mark making in the garden

In our garden, the children have been exploring and developing their mark making skills. recently, the children have been exploring patterns and different ways to make them.

At our provocation area, the children were using flour and paint brushes to copy and create patterns…

the children were also exploring mark making in the gross motor art area of the garden today by using the cars to create patterns on paper with paint…

Over the next few weeks, we will be developing our mark making skills through various experiences outdoors and exploring and developing our knowledge of patterns in our environment.

Exploring our Senses

This week in the garden we have been exploring our sense of smell by using the herbs growing in our garden in different ways.

Today we explored our senses further by using teabags to create our own art in the studio.

We started by using our sense of smell to make observations about the different kinds of tea. We discussed the different kind of scents and what they smelled like.

“It’s mint”

“It smells like toothpaste”

“Like strawberry”

“We have mint in the garden”

To create our masterpiece we placed the tea bags on paper and used spray bottles with water to wet the tea bags. This is an excellent way to developing our fine motor skills. As the teabags absorbed the water we squeezed them, painted with them and explored the mixing of the colours.  We also talked about the texture of the tea as the bags started to break apart.

“It feels like sand”

“Little bits stick to me”

“It’s soft”

“I like mud in the garden”

The studio is now smelling very lovely, We all had lots of fun exploring our senses and creative skills.

The final masterpiece. Well done everyone!

Let’s get building!

Today in the discovery room the children have been having lots of fun working together as a team to build brilliant models.

This morning the children were using their problem solving skills to build their fantastic fire engine, great job!


“This is our fire engine.”

”I’m the driver.”

“I’m on the phone”

This afternoon the children were super busy, using their creative skills to build their spaceship for everyone to join.


“This bit needs to go here”

”I’ll fix it”

Everyone aboard! The children were all very engaged in playing in the ‘spaceship’ and acting out scenarios. We even spotted aliens in space!

“Everyone get in, blast off.”

”we’re in space, I can see aliens.”

 

 

 

Patchwork houses

Thank you so much for all the kind donations of boxes and cardboard  for our junk modelling area. We decided to have a look in our Cardboard Creations book for some inspiration!   We loved the patchwork houses in our book and decided we would make some of our own!

We discussed what resources we would need and decided on:

“glue to stick things on”

“cardboard or boxes to make the house”

”scissors to cut things”.

”pens to draw windows and a door to get in”

”material, coloured paper and buttons to stick on”

We worked together to collect our resources and shared our thoughts on why we had chosen them.

”I’m choosing pink, it’s my favourite colour”.

”My favourite is red”.

”my favourite is red too”.

It was a bit tricky to cut the cardboard so we decided it would be safer if an adult used bigger scissors to cut it for us.  Using our smaller scissors helped us develop our fine motor skills, through cutting our paper, ribbon and wool.

Next it was time to design our house! We demonstrated excellent mark making and writing skills by adding our own features to our houses.

“I’m drawing windows. We need them up at the top, and at the bottom”.

”I’m drawing a door so we can get in and out”.

”I need a chimney, it goes on the top on the roof”.

”I’m writing number 23, that’s the same as my house”.

It was lots of fun choosing different materials to glue onto our houses. We used our knowledge to describe our materials and explain why we had chosen them.

“I like this one, it looks like a picnic blanket!”

”I like the pink one. It’s shiny and smooth”.

”The green one is like a tree, it’s fluffy”.

”The ribbon looks like a tractor wheel”.

”This one is black and white and it has flowers on it”.

”I love the blue one, it’s bumpy and has sparkles on it”.

”I’m putting buttons on. I like the colours”.

The glue on our houses was still a bit wet, so we decided to put them up to dry. When we put all our houses together, we decided it looked like “a wee village!”

It was so much fun making our houses and we can’t wait to see what else we can create!

 

 

 

 

Counting animals on the Farm

Today in the Noisy/Quiet room the children continued to develop their learning of “farms”. The children had been showing an interest in farms and we choose this as the learning focus of our floorbook.


So far, we have been learning to use the animals and farm to create drama and role play scenarios.

We found a book that showed us sign language for some animal names. We could copy some of the signs for cow, horse and pig.
 


We also enjoyed perfecting our fine manipulative and problem solving skills with jigsaws that are in the theme of farms.

 

One of the children noticed we had a lot of animals on our farm. We decided to try our hand at some data analysis.
First, we got some large paper, then wrote the name of the animal at the top.

Next, we filled a box full of mystery animals and we took it in turns to select one from the box and matched it to the paper with that animal on it, making a 3D graph to record our findings.

We sorted and categorised each animal and, at the end, we counted up how many of each animal we had and wrote our findings.
 

We had lots of fun extending our Maths skills during this learning experience.
We recorded this learning experience in the floor book, with the children taking ownership by cutting the photos and writing their own comments. The children enjoy looking through the floorbooks to reflect on their past learning.
Next time you visit the centre why not take a look at our wonderful floorbooks.

Liquid Layer’s 👩‍🔬 👨‍🔬

Today in the discovery room, we found some interesting new books about science, and even found some experiments we wanted to put into practice.

 

“Look, it’s a big spaceship!!”

The children chose their favourite experience from the book and have loved experimenting with different liquids.  We explored how they can change when mixed together, and what happens to the different layers. We used very basic ingredients, and got to mixing! The children liked predicting what they thought might happen…

“Is it going to explode like a volcano?”

“Maybe it will fizz up!”

We simply mixed water with food colouring, oil and golden syrup to create our magic mixture. The children suggested we all tried adding it in different orders to see if the outcome would be any different. We were really interested to see that no matter what order we mixed our ingredients, it turned out exactly the same every time!

“It’s because the syrup is the heaviest!”

“The oil is floating to the top. Look at the bubbles, it’s like a lava lamp!”

“Bubbles!!”

As the syrup is much more dense than the other liquids, it sunk to the bottom each time, and the oil floated all the way to the top. We even put all our mixtures into one big jug to see what would happen, and it turned back into 3 perfect layers!

Well done everybody! Let’s get our thinking caps on for our next experiment 👩‍🔬 👨‍🔬

 

No Such Thing As Nessie!!!

Today Bookbug came to visit as it is Scottish Book week and we decided to  sing some songs…

We started with Ally Bally Bee, we were singing and clapping much to our neighbours delight

We sang Wee Willie Winkie and were laughing to think of a wee boy chapping at the windaes and crying through the locks in his nightgown!!!

A decision to be made what story would we like Skye the Puffling or No Such Thing as Nessie…..the story of Nessie won and we had lots of discussions  about monsters scaffolding our  learning from each other by sharing all the interesting facts we knew.

Can you believe we even sang about shoving our grannies aff the bus……but please nobody worry as all our children assured me they would never do this! 😉

 

What a lot of fun we had enjoying stories and songs together 😀

Legends in the Studio

As it is Scotland book week we have continued to develop the childrens interest in the studio. We have been doing some research about the Loch Ness monster. We have had a look at some Scottish books and watched a short film.

 

The children discovered that the monster lives in Loch Ness and the water is very deep and dark as the water is full of peat from the surrounding hills. We then decided to recreate our our own Loch Ness monsters using the clay.

Our clay is a great way to strengthen the muscles in our fingers and hands whilst developing our fine motor skills and imagination. The children discussed how they would like their own monsters to look, “mine has flippers”   “mine is going to be so big” some of the children enjoyed using the clay tools to make the eyes and patterns on the skin.

We have loved bringing our legends to life and look forward to our next book.