All posts by Miss Campbell

Expressive Arts

Inspiring creations with playdough

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Today in the Home room we have enjoyed spending time at the playdough station.  We have learned lots of different skills while we manipulate the dough into wonderful creations. We used a variety of loose parts to inspire our creative thought and design processes.

First we made the playdough. The children asked for purple playdough. We decided to use our colour mixing skills to make purple by mixing red and blue paint together.

“First we need blue”

“Then red”


“Look what’s happened when we mixed them together. It’s purple”

After we had made our playdough, we began to let out our imaginations flow, creating our playdough masterpieces.


“I made a sun”

“

”Look it’s a unicorn”

“It’s a star wars alien space ship with lasers that are flying”

“It’s a face and the dark purple is the hair”

“I’m using the stones to make a happy face”.

We have been engaging fully with our learning today, building new skills are proud to show everyone what we created.

I wonder what we will make tomorrow with the playdough?

Expressive Arts

Musical Mornings

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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.

Digital Technology, Expressive Arts

Interacting with music

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We have been continuing our musical learning in our Studio Room. We have been playing new games on our interactive board that teach us music.
We have  our very own interactive piano. The piano keys are displayed on the board and we use our musical skills to play the notes to make our sounds. We have been learning that the colours represent the notes. When you play a long note it has a long block of colour and a short note produces a small colour. When we play the piano scale, it will make a rainbow of colour notes. We have very much enjoyed this.

The next game we have is blob opera. It’s a very funny game that teaches us about singing in different pitches, the longer the blob goes the higher the note he sings. We can even take the blobs on tour over the world stages. We can record the blobs singing and listen back to what operatic song we made.

Finally,  we have the paint with music game. This game teaches us to paint with sound. We can choose from a range of instruments and make our marks across the screen.  This combines sound with mark making  encouraging children to make music following our marks. We can select from different canvases to create our paint with music.

We have very much enjoyed exploring music in this way, bringing music to life for our learners.

Literacy

Sleeping Bunnies

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We have been celebrating Book Week Scotland and Nursery Rhyme week here in our Studio Room.
Today’s  rhyme is Sleeping Bunnies. It’s a favourite of ours and most of us are familiar with the song and actions. For some it was a brand new song to hear. We used the smart board to listen to Bookbug singing us Sleeping Bunnies.

Now that we all knew what to do we had a turn of joining in.
First we pretended we were the sleeping bunnies

Then we sang our merry  song and then….. wake up bunnies


It was time to hop like little bunnies


It was lots of fun. We used lots of skills throughout this experience, we extend our vocabulary by learning new songs, our gross motor skills to hop and our expressive arts to sing and our imagination to become bunnies.

We also used our nursery rhyme books to look for other familiar rhymes. We have been learning that we can find out information from a book.

We had to look at the picture to give us a clue to what the rhyme may be.

we guessed almost all of the rhymes.
I wonder what tomorrow’s rhyme will be?

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

Let’s count with Bookbug!

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Today Bookbug came to visit! Bookbug knew we have been taking part in Maths Week Scotland here at Cart Mill and wanted to introduce us to number songs and rhymes.
BookBug brought his box filled with wonderful visual aids, puppets and books to help us have fun with our numeracy and maths skills through our songs and rhymes.

We started off by singing our welcome song to warm up all our voices.
We sang our number songs next such as 1,2,3,4,5 and 5 little peas. These songs teach us to count forwards in sequence.
We then sang songs such as 5 little ducks and 5 fat sausages to help us practice counting backwards in sequence. Ours songs also introduced us to early mathematical concepts such as adding and subtracting.

Then the stretchy Lycra came out and the puppets were bouncing and jumping up and down! We were using our listening skills, hand-eye co-ordination as well as numeracy and rhyming skills.

We all enjoyed singing number songs with Bookbug.

Numbers are all around us. Songs and rhymes are a fantastic way for us to learn and develop our numeracy and mathematical skills. What number songs can you sing at home?

Expressive Arts

Our future Artists.

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Today in the Studio Room we were using our creative skills to make our massive art piece.
First we selected the colours we wanted to use.

Then we picked our paper and used the floor as our canvas.

We picked the tools we wanted to experiment with and got our paint ready to use.

All the children had so much fun having the large space to express their creative arts, we used our mark making skills to make unique and wonderful marks. We used both our fine and gross motor skills to complete our masterpiece.

The children decided to use their hands and feet to gain a whole sensory experience.
We have very happy children in our Studio Room, engaging fully in their learning.
Maybe we have some future artists here in our Studio.

 

Expressive Arts

Letters to Santa.

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This Week in the Home Room we have been writing our letters to Santa.

We have been spending time at our writing station practicing our mark-making skills and looking at magazines with pictures of toys in them discussing what we would like for our Christmas presents from Santa this year.

The children have had great enjoyment at making their Santa List and getting to share their ideas with their friends.

Even our Elf was writing his list for Santa. The children wonder if the Elf will take some of our Santa Lists back to the North Pole.

We developed lots of skills during this activity such as mark-making, early writing skills, fine manipulative skills, and letter recognition.


Merry Christmas everyone from all in the Home Room, hope Santa brings you everything on your list.