Category Archives: Expressive Arts

Expressive Arts, Literacy

Bookbug joins us for some spring songs 🐣🐑🌞

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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!

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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….

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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.

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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.

 

 

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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 📖📚

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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!

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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 💡🖌

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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.

 

Creative movement, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Perfectly Patterned Pictures

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We have really enjoyed making patterns in our gross motor art area. We have investigated making marks with a variety of resources. We’ve used plungers to make circle prints.

We have used a selection of different types and sizes of brushes to see what marks and patterns we can create with them, such as large paint bushes, rollers, sweeping brushes and scrubbing brushes.

After we used our tyres to make large patterns  we wondered what we could use next?

Luckily we got a special delivery. A new gross motor art tool to help us further develop our gross motor art skills.
We got brand new large pattern rollers.  We couldn’t wait to get a turn of them and try them out.
First we tried putting a large sheet of paper down to see what marks we could make.

We enjoyed rolling the large rollers in the paint then pushing them over the paper, but it soon got filled up and we couldn’t see which patterns we had made. We decided to make it even more fun by taking the paper away. To have a larger area to explore our patterns and progress our skills even more.

By using the ground as our canvas, we could go further, see our marks more clearly and change direction.

We needed lots of paint to extend our marks, we rolled our roller in the paint and set off.

On one roller we had stripes.

And on the other we had spots.


We created a wonderful pattern picture in our gross motor art area for every one to admire.

We all were engaged and enjoyed this experience. Everyone was keen to have a turn. We were able to wait our turn and share.

Now that we have investigated patterns in our gross motor art area next we will be looking at “Street Art.” We have added some pictures of local murals that are around Glasgow to inspire our children to create their own.

I wonder what Street Art we will be creating next?

Creative movement, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Terrific tyre treads and painty patterns in the puddles

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In our gross motor art area in the garden we have been exploring art on a large scale.  So far we have used large brushes, mops, spray bottles and plungers. Today however we decided to make our art even bigger.

We decided to use the tyres to roll in the paint and see the patterns it made. We popped on our wellies and puddlesuits due to the rain showers we had this morning, and got to work creating our massive masterpiece.

It was interesting to see the different patterns the tyre made depending on where it rolled.

We had long tread marks and circles prints where it landed.

Because of the rain our patterns washed away quickly so we just had to make more.

It was a bit tricky at first to roll the tyre all the way across on our own ,we problem solved and thought,  how about making it a team effort.

So we worked together to roll the tyres back and forward to each other.  Team work made the art work!

We investigated who could push it the furthest and what kind of patterns did we make if we pushed it faster or slower.

We had so much fun with this large scale art outdoor experience. It was funny when the tyre splatted in the paint in the middle.

We tried different colours of powder paint to see which colours made the best pattern.

The rain got a little heavy at one point, but it mixed in with the powder paint and made our paint mix together and create much more paint puddles to roll our tyre into.

This was a great experience for our children of all ages to expand and inspire their creative designs, while also developing their gross motor skills.

We had our gross motor art tools beside us incase any one wanted to choose a different way to create art, but the tyre was the winner today.

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Play dough patterns and Creations

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This week at the play dough area we are looking at patterns we can make in the play dough using resources and natural materials. As always our children can confidently make their play dough.

The girls and boys then chose which resources they would like to use. We picked lovely patterned rolling pines, some leaves and sticks .

The boys and girls had to use all their muscles to pull off the leaves 🍃 and the break up some sticks . We made sure there was no jaggy edges on the sticks that might hurt us.

We then began to use our rolling pins across the leaves so that we could see the print  it left in the play dough. We learnt that the harder your roll the better the print.

As we have very creative children  the children started to explore what else they could do. Look my tree stands up high . Some of the children could demonstrate problem solving techniques and perseverance. “ Look I made my tree stand up using more play dough at the bottom “.

The girls and boys worked well together helping each other make their prints and admiring each other’s work.

We had great fun making prints with the leaves and rolling pin . We made holes with the sticks and of course we made chicken wraps,pancakes,plants, jack and the beanstalk.
We look forward to discovering what else we can make patterns with in our play dough.

Article – I have the right to explore my strengths and creativity .

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Natures Canvas

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Today in our gross motor art area, we used the translucent board to paint on.  Before we started we got some powder paint mixed with water. We chose colours that represented nature. Green for the grass and trees, blue for the sky and orange for the sunsets.
We decided to use large pots today to make it a little different learning experience than indoor art. We wanted to extend our gross motor art and take our skills we learned in our studio painting area into a larger creative environment outdoors.

Inside our pots we had a selection of gross motor art utensils to select from. We had mops, rollers and large paint bushes.

When we were making our creations we talked about what we could see in the outdoor environment and what was the inspiration for our art.

We each took a turn of painting and sometimes we worked along side our peers to create collaborative art.

We used our gross motor skills as we had to bend and stretch to dip the large brushes/rollers into the tubs and use our arms/hands  to help us control where we put the paint while using the large brushes.

Once we had got the hang of our gross motor art painting we decided we wanted an even bigger space, so we used the nursery garden as our “natures canvas”. It looked nice and bright with all the colours we used.

This is a great experience for our children to let there creativity take over with a large space and freedom to design. It is a learning experience that can be easily adapted to differentiate the learning between our 2-3 year olds and our 3-5year olds while simultaneously having fun along side each other with our older children role modelling for our younger ones.

I wonder where our creative gross motor art journey will take us tomorrow. Feel free to have a look at our floor book next time you are in to see what we have been learning in our outdoor art area.

Article 29 – “you have the right to education which tries to develop your personality and abilities as much as possible and encourages you to respect other peoples rights and values and to respect the environment.”  (UNCRC)