Category Archives: Expressive Arts

World Earth Day Painting

April 22, 2024 Miss Welsh Leave a comment

In Cart Mill, the children enjoy painting and exploring the use of different textures and materials.

As part of World Earth Day the children were creating their very own planet earth by painting on tin foil using cotton buds as a painting tool. This activity helps to promote the childrens’ creativity, whilst enhancing their fine motor skills.

First, we covered the paper plates with tin foil to create our earth.

Next, the children chose colours that represented the earth. Blue for the sea, green for the land and white for the clouds.

They described what they were painting and how it looked and sounded.

Water!

“Shiny”

“Noisy”

“Ta da”

Some of the children also created amazing artwork using the tin foil as a printing tool. This method produced a lovely textured painting.

The children showed great enthusiasm when painting their planet earth and demonstrated excellent focus and poise.

Lovely work everyone.

We then learned some new World Earth Day songs to familiar rhymes that we already know.

Article 31 (leisure, play and culture). Every child has the right to relax, play and take part in a wide range of cultural and artistic activities.

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy

Welcome to our hairdressers ✂️

April 15, 2024 Miss Brown Leave a comment

A conversation sparked between the children when some members of staff came to nursery last week after having their hair done in preparation for Derek’s Big Day.

“I went to the hairdressers last week”

” Can I do your hair?”

“My mum gets her hair cut in my kitchen, the hairdresser comes to my house”

“I go to the barbers with daddy”

The children used imaginary brushes and “honey spray” to do each others hair until it was “nice and soft”. This morning I left a box of hair styling and barber tools in the home corner to see what the children did with them.

They tried out some of the tools, brought some chairs over and then went searching for new customers to get their hair done.

“My mum has one of these, she uses it before work In the morning”

“The baby doesn’t have lots of hair”

“Next! What number do you want, a 1 or a 2 or a 3?”

“Look at me, do you like my new hair?”

The children loved being hairdressers and barbers for the day, they were so excited to share and re-enact their own experiences of hair cuts, at home, at the barbers or at the salon. They can’t wait to do it all again tomorrow.

“Can we do it again tomorrow?”

Creative movement, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Street Art Garden. 🌼🌸🌺

April 11, 2024 Miss Campbell Leave a comment

Some of our children have been commenting on the wonderful, colourful flowers we have growing in our garden.

This was the inspiration for our next street art creation in our gross motor art area in our garden.
We chose colours that we thought were like the ones we had seen on our flowers. One of the children wanted pink. Using our colour mixing skills, we mixed our red and white to make a pastel pink colour. We also mixed red and blue together with a little white to create a wonderful deep purple colour.

We made some flowers on our ground in chalk as the start of our street art creation and got our paints and brushes ready to use. As we were using the ground as our canvas, we made sure we put on our welly boots and aprons to protect our clothes.

Now for the fun part. To get creating and using our gross motor art skills.

Some of our children wanted to use the paints to colour in the chalk outlines.

Some of our children wanted to design their own flowers using lots of different colours to create a rainbow flower.

We were enjoying having the freedom to create and use the paints in our design process on a larger scale.

We spoke about what kind of flowers we were making for our street art garden. We had Daffodils, Tulips, Sunflowers and even a Spider-Man flower.

Some children were finding their own spontaneous inspiration and created different shapes.

We even made numbers and fruits as well with one child creating a green apple and a yellow banana.

We had so much fun painting our street art garden in the sun and letting our creative thinking shine.

I think our street art garden looks as wonderful and as colourful as the real flowers in our garden.

Article 21 – “Your education should help you use and develop your talents and abilities. It should also help you to learn to live peacefully, protect the environment and respect other people.”

Expressive Arts, Literacy

Bookbug joins us for some spring songs 🐣🐑🌞

April 5, 2024 Mrs Johnston Leave a comment

Bookbug came to visit us today so we all sang our ‘Hallo’ song to welcome him..

We wondered how many spring animals were on the farm…we thought about chicks, lambs, bunnies.

We pretended to be bunnies with flies upon on noses and curly whiskers 😂 enjoying the song Little Peter Rabbit. We were dancing, jumping and hopping to Sleepy Bunnies and after all that exercise, sat down and enjoyed the story of the 6 Little Chicks.

It’s so lovely that spring has arrived, to think and see the wonders of nature, the bright mornings and light evenings, the flowers and plants and to enjoy all this with our friends 😁

Article 31 You have the right to play and relax by doing things like sports, music and drama

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy, Outdoor Learning

Creating The Cart Mill Scarecrow!

March 28, 2024 Mr Edwards Leave a comment

In our garden adventures on Wednesday, we dove into the beloved story of “The Scarecrows Wedding” by Julia Donaldson. Inspired by the tale, one of our little minds proposed an exciting idea – let’s make our own scarecrow to protect our plants from hungry birds!

”The birds like to eat fruit so they maybe will eat our seeds”

Excitement bubbled as we brainstormed what we’d need, just like in the story we got to work and wrote some lists. These included:

Straw
Clothes
Hat
Scarf
Head
Legs
Face

With our list in hand, we turned to the internet for guidance. Click the link to try building a scarecrow at home. How to build a scarecrow

Today was the big day! We gathered our supplies and got busy.

First, we stuffed some old clothes with straw to make our scarecrow’s body. We made sure everything was nice and secure.

Next came the fun part – creating the face! We discussed facial features together and gave it some eyes, a nose and a big friendly smile. We also gave it some lovely Cart Mill branding.

Once the body and face were ready, we used sticks from our willow tree to give our scarecrow a strong frame. Then, we proudly placed it in the garden to stand guard over our precious veggies.

As we admired our handiwork, one question remained: What should we name our new friend? Suggestions flew around, each more imaginative than the last. It came to a vote and we decided on Harry!

With our scarecrow watching over the garden, we wrapped up another day of fun and learning in our outdoor classroom. 😀

Article 13 (freedom of expression)

Article 31 (leisure, play and culture)

Article 28 (right to education)

Creativity, Digital Technology, Expressive Arts

Play dough shapes and numbers….

March 27, 2024 Miss Keith Leave a comment

At the play dough table our children are always very busy . This week we have tried forming the dough into shapes, numbers and patterns. The children drew some patterns that we could use with the play dough.

Play dough gives the children an excellent opportunity to develop fine motor skills and strengthen the muscles in their fingers and hands.

We used our hands ,fingers and rolling pins to help make the shapes for the numbers. “It’s very soft” “ mine is nearly long, now it might fit”.

Some of the children could recognise the numbers that were written and some of the children filled the circles with play dough to count to the number . “I have two circles it’s the number 2 “

The children were able to recognise most of the shapes “it’s a circle” “ now it’s a purple circle”. Our children were very pleased when they completed a shape . “I need four pieces for a square”.

The children also enjoy taking photos of their hard work and record them in their learning journals. This reminds us all of how creative the Cart Mill children are.

Using our fabulous imaginations, the children enjoyed creating their own patterns and designs! We had lovely rainbows, cherry pies and so much more! We are looking forward to many more play dough creations.

Article- You have the right to development and participation.

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy, Social Studies

Story time 📖📚

March 26, 2024 Miss Brown Leave a comment

This morning the children had transferred some of our stories and story puppets to the home corner.

They brought some of our dolls over and pretended they were going to read them a story. First of all they picked out “A squash and a squeeze” then showed the ‘babies’ the matching puppets and named them.

“This one is the pig, the pig says oink”

” This is cow, he says Moooo!”

” The hen goes cluck, cluck”

Using the pictures the children showed their understanding of what was happening in the story and ‘read’ to the babies, using the puppets as they went along and imitating the ways that adults round about them would read a story.

“The hen knocked the jug over”

“Lady pushes pig in house”

“and the cow, its getting too busy in there”

The children had so much fun using their imagination to re-enact real life situations in the home corner.

Article 31 (leisure, play and culture) Every child has the right to relax, play and take part in a wide range of cultural and artistic activities.

Expressive Arts, Special Event

Super Spring Crafts!

March 25, 2024 Mrs Hannah Leave a comment

It has been lovely to see the first signs of spring arriving at Cart Mill through our beautiful crocuses and daffodils blooming in our garden, which inspired some fabulous art artwork!

What better way to celebrate the arrival of Spring than to welcome our families to join us at our Spring Craft Event! As ever, our children brought their creativity and enthusiasm and created some wonderful transient art, spring wreaths and some amazing artwork using their foot and handprints to display on our wall!

Of course we can’t forget decorating our biscuits, which were a firm favourite!

“I putted lots of sprinkles on mine”

”I love jam”

Family is so important to us at Cart Mill, please feel free to pop in anytime for a coffee, chat or to stay and play.

Article 31 – I have the right to relax and play.

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy

Fun with words 💡🖌

March 21, 2024 Ms Partridge Leave a comment

The children have been experimenting with mark making in the clay area today using a variety of interesting materials, and demonstrated fabulous letter recognition while investigating the resources. Some children created their own names…

Other children enjoyed copying the letters themselves using the clay tools…

Some children recognised familiar letters from their friends and families names…

“How do I make Mummy? I need an M”

The children had lots of fun exploring the different sounds the letters make, and learning how they work together to create new and fun words.

“what does this say?”

”lots of words!”

“E for elephant.”

“no that’s an e”

”No it’s a big letter so it’s E! A big capital E”

The children have shown wonderful creativity while developing their literacy skills at the clay table, and most importantly had lots of fun doing it. They have even suggested we try shapes next time!

Article 29 – I have the right to an education that develops my personality.