Garden fun at Cart Mill

We have been having lots of fun in our garden this week at Cart Mill. The children have been extremely busy and creative using their imagination in their play…

On Monday, we opened the ‘Cart Mill Cafe’ where macaroni cheese, chips and ice cream were the speciality! The children used various pots and pans, spoons and bowls and lots of mud to create their meals in the cafe. Throughout this experience the children were developing their role play and imagination skills and using real life experiences in their play.

What would you like from the ‘Cart Mill Cafe’ the next time you visit the nursery?

                              ”I’m making you some macaroni cheese”

”I need to mix the cake, you scoop up the cake and mix it together in the bowl, it needs to go in the oven”

” Here’s ice cream, it has a flake in the top and chocolate sauce”

Then, today, we got a special show performance on our stage in the garden! The children treated us to a performance of ”5 little monkey’s jumping on the bed”. We had to be patient and wait for the curtains to open and for the show to begin…

”It’s nearly time for the show to begin”

     

The children had so much fun putting on a show for their friends, we even had some music on to dance along to!

Amazing Architecture in Cart Mill City

Over the last few weeks, we have spent lots of time in our construction and block play area. We are so lucky to have a large selection of block play and construction materials to choose from here at Cart Mill. This gives us the opportunity to explore our creativity through designing and building our own models.

Using one of our house plans as a guide, we chose various sizes of wooden blocks to recreate our own houses! Using our knowledge of shapes, positional language and by working together, we created a living room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom!  By adding loose parts, we were able to add some extra special features!

“There’s a kitchen. This is the living room. We’re going to make a dining room”.
“The kitchen is next to the living room.  The bathroom is behind the kitchen.”
“It’s got 2 toilets”.
“These are the statues. My mummy has statues in the bathroom”.
“It has a chimney. Steam comes out of it and the bad guys can’t come in!”  “This is my bedroom.  I’m putting a cushion in to lie on”.

Using smaller blocks gives us the opportunity to develop both our fine motor and problem solving skills by discovering how to connect the blocks together to build our models.

We all love playing with our stickle bricks and Lego.  Sometimes it can be really tricky to fit the blocks together. With a bit of patience, perseverance and using our fantastic imaginations, we have created some fantastic models!

“It’s a birthday cake with candles on it”.
”It’s a T”.

“I made a play park.  It has a climbing frame, a slide and a swimming pool”.

Working together and sharing our ideas, we were able to create our very own Cart Mill Lego city! Isn’t it fabulous! We think we would have lots of fun living there!  Can you recognise the special people who live there?

“The swimming pool looks like so much fun. It has a bit to jump off into the water and you go up the stairs and through the door to get to the slide.  It’s got a cafe if we are hungry!”.

To challenge ourselves further, we decided to take our block building  outside! It was so much fun! Working together, we placed the blocks carefully in front and behind each other to create a path all round the Cart  Mill garden! It was sooooo big and meant we were able to walk all round the garden without our feet touching the ground (the floor is lava after all!).

 

 

 

 

Snakes and ladders 🪱🪜

Today the boys decided to play a game of snakes and ladders. This game encourages collaborative play, turn taking, patience!

Working together to set up the game encourages number recognition and colour recognition deciding which colour of counter you’d prefer.

Playing the game encourages touch counting, directional language forwards, backwards, up the ladder, down the snake.

“Your turn, my turn” rolling a six, gets another turn – understanding the rules of the game and developing an understanding that it may not always be your turn is a concept that some children can find very hard.

We then developed our learning experience by creating our own snakes and ladders boards.

Snakes and ladders is a fantastic game with many learning opportunities and can be lots of fun!🥰

Who is that in the mirror..

Today the children have been very creative in the Discovery room. They have used loose parts in many different ways.

After discovering their own reflections in the mirror they decided to use some loose parts to recreate their features using the different pieces.

‘eyes and nose’

“that’s my face, I can use these stones for my eyes and this small one for my nose”

The children used the loose parts to sort and match by colour and practice their counting skills.

”blue like your eyes”

We counted together… “1,2,3,4,5”

Loose parts are a great way for children to use their imagination and learn in lots of different ways.  They are able to arrange and rearrange, sort, match and create their own images focusing on the process instead of the end product.

Pancake Friday

Did you know today was Pancake Friday? Well it was at Cart Mill! We thought it was so nice outside we should have snack out in the garden, but what could we have? Pancakes was the request. So, we decided to get to work mixing the flour, sugar, milk and an egg to make our pancake batter. Once we were all sitting down, we spoke about keeping safe around the fire.

Then it was time to light the fire

We put some butter in the frying pan so the pancake mix wouldn’t stick but we noticed very quickly that the butter had melted in the pan before it had even got near the fire. That made us wonder, what made it melt? After a lot of thought, we realised that the sun had been so hot in the sky, it had melted the butter!

We put the pan on the fire and added our runny pancake mix and we sat and waited. What did we begin to notice? Bubbles! There were little bubbles appearing on top of our pancake mix. We learned that this happens because the heat is cooking the pancake mixture.

Once there were a lot of bubbles it was time to flip our pancakes. Because we were outside at the fire pit, we decided that flipping them in the air might be a bit dangerous so we used a spatula to turn them over. When the first one turned over it was different shades of brown.

“it looks like the world!”
Soon all the pancakes were ready to eat, we put some butter on them and enjoyed them round the fire pit.

Cart Mill’s Pancake Friday was a hit!

Getting Creative with clay using sea shells 🐚 🐚

Today in the Studio room We have been sharing stories of summer, our holidays together and the fun days we have had with our families at the beach. 🐚  😎 ☀️
We have made sand castles, splashed in the sea, and when digging in the sand or looking in rock pools we have found and made sea shell collections. We looked at some shells we have in our nursery and discussed the different shapes, sizes and colours they were.

“This one’s got a crab in it” 🦀

 

“It feels smooth”

“This is a big flat one” 

“This one is bumpy”

“This one is round and bumpy “🐚

“ we can hear the sea in it”

First we made a round ball shape by rolling the cold sticky clay in our hands. We then pressed it down to make a flat shape before pressing our shells on to the clay to make some beautiful prints and patterns.
We found by pressing the shells into the clay we could make our own fossils!

Creating art with clay and shells gave the children endless ways to get creative and explore different textures through nature.

Clay also stimulates the children’s curiosity and imagination whilst exercising their fine motor skills when rolling, pressing and moulding.

We sat our clay shells  aside to dry out before we painted  them to make some colourful decorations for our nursery and home gardens.

“ I am going to paint mine blue and white”

“ I want to put on lots of colours on mine”

” I am going to put on lots of glitter on mine”

The children express and developed there creative skills and strengthen there fingers and hands and arm muscles.

What can you make at home using your sea shell collection? Let us know how you can be creative ! 🐚 🐚 🐚 

 

 

 

Kandinsky kids

We have been learning about different styles of art while developing our gross motor mark making skills and this morning we have been looking at the work of the artist Kandinsky. We discussed how the circles could have been created and the different colours he used. We noticed each adjacent circle was a different colour. Then we started creating our own using the mini mops and a selection of colours.


“It’s like a rainbow Easter egg!”


“It looks like a tornado. You’re going to get sucked in to it!”

Then we decided to try a different method and use brushes to make smaller circles.


“Look at all my spirals.”

Absolutely amazing pieces of art created and some good messy fun!

Textile Textures

Today the children explored a variety of materials and different textures in the sewing area.

We looked at cellophane,carpet, silk, felt, bubble wrap and hessian. The children were able to describe how these materials felt.

“This is a bit jaggy”

“It is so soft”

“This one is smooth”

“Oh that’s crinkly”

We cut the materials into squares and thought it would be a great idea to make our own texture board.  The children chose the materials they wanted to use and were keen to create stitches on them, using good hand and eye co-ordination we were able to put together a selection of materials for our board.

We then displayed our work on the texture board in our sewing area.

The children were very proud of their hard work and the children invited their friends to come have a look and feel the different textures.

Learning to make playdough 👩🏻‍🍳🧑🏻‍🍳👩🏼‍🎨🧑🏾‍🎨

Playdough is a great experience for lots of different reasons. It’s sensory fun to explore, but it can be about anything you want it to be! Sharing, measuring, fine motor skills, colours, shapes, role playing and so much more. You decide!

The best part about playdough is it is actually super easy to make, with very basic ingredients. You probably have them in your kitchen already.

All you need is;

3 scoops of flour

1 scoop of salt

1 scoop of oil

1 scoop of water

That’s the basic dough recipe in the bowl. It’s time to decide what kind of playdough you would like; colourful, scented, soft? There are different ingredients you can add for different reasons. If you want it very soft, there are some magic ingredients to add before you mix it together: conditioner, shaving foam, cornflour. Or some nice scents like vanilla essence, lemon, orange, mint or lavender are popular favourites from our children at Cart Mill.

Now your dough is ready to mix together. If it all comes together like scone mixture, it’s ready for squishing!

 

“squish it nice and soft”

”I’m going to squash it like Hulk. “

Being part of the process when making playdough gives a sense of independence to our children, as does helping to clear it all up at the end. Good job everyone, and good luck making your own at home 🤩

🍦🍧😎 Cool Fridays 😎🍧🍦

🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️

After a long hot week we cooled off today with some tasty treats!

We talked together about different ways we cooled ourselves down when the weather was really warm and made us feel really hot!
There were so many great ideas!

“I play water fights”

“I drink lots of water”

“I use sun cream and I wear a hat”

“I eat ice cream and ice poles”

”My favourite is to eat ice lollies”

We all agreed that one of the best ways to cool down was to eat ice cream or ice lollies! This gave us an idea… to make our own ice cream shop where we could sell all sorts of ice creams, ice lollies, milk shakes and ice poles.

We used a selection of craft materials to make our icy treats and our ice cream shop.

We then each took turns to be the shop keeper or be the customer.
Which cool treat would be your favourite?
”I like a strawberry cone and sauce”

”mmmmm mint choc chip is the best”

“I like to lick the ice lollies”

To finish our day we made it real – we had some icy treats at snack time! What a great way to end our hot and busy week, before the rain came! 😎

Hopefully Mr Sun will be back soon! 🌞

🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️🌞☀️

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