Category Archives: Literacy

Literacy

What’s in the box?

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Within the STEM area we have been learning about our bodies and how they work. Today we focused on learning about our hands and our sense of touch. To help our understanding we played a game of What’s in the Box? The children had to close their eyes while I placed three objects in the box. Then they had to put their hands through the holes in the side of the box and feel the objects, describing them to their friends. Next they had to match the objects from the tray to what they felt and place them on top of the box. Lastly, turn the box around for the big reveal, does it match?

The children then decided they would like to play the game independently.

They were absolutely fantastic at taking turns and encouraging each other to describe the objects.  They even started increasing the amount of objects they had to feel.

Time for the big reveal- is it a match???

Yeesssss!!

There was great excitement when we made the match!

The boys and girls used great descriptive language and demonstrated brilliant co-operative working. Well done, everyone!

Article 29- We have the right to an education which develops our personality, talents and abilities.

Literacy

Finger Gym Fun!

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Currently in the writing area, our children have been exploring different ways to develop their fine motor skills.

Children need good fine motor control to hold and use a pencil or crayon correctly. Skills such as drawing pictures and eventually writing letters all rely on fine motor strength and coordination. Take a look at some of the fine motor activities we’ve been enjoying this week.

Tweezers and fidget boards

The children used tweezers to pick up colourful pom-poms and carefully place them into the tiny holes on our fidget boards. While it may look like a simple, this activity is a excellent way to build the fine motor strength needed for early writing skills. 

By using tweezers, children are strengthening the small muscles in their hands and fingers, helping them develop the pincer grip they will later use to hold a pencil correctly. The act of picking up each pom-pom and placing it in the right spot requires hand–eye coordination, concentration, and careful control of their movements.

Many children even took on extra challenges, such as sorting the pom-poms by colour or counting them as they worked. This added opportunities for early maths skills, like counting, sorting, and problem-solving, all within a fun, play-based activity. Most importantly, this task gave the children a sense of achievement as they completed their colourful patterns and designs, building confidence as well as skill.

Letters and pipe cleaners

The children threaded pipe cleaners through letters to develop fine motor skills and hand–eye coordination. We Introducing large plastic letters with holes in them and provided colourful pipe cleaners for threading. This activity not only strengthened the children’s fine motor control but also introduced important early literacy skills in a fun and hands on way. As they worked many children began to recognise letters, with some even threading the letters in their own names! With a little adult support, a few created longer words such as “mummy” and “octopus”. This gave them a real sense of pride and showed how early mark making and letter recognition naturally develop through play.

UNCRC ARTICLES 

Article 28 – A right to education

Article 31 – The right to play and relax

 

Creative movement, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy, Outdoor Learning

Fun with Gross Motor Art!

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Recently in the garden we have been enjoying ourselves at the gross motor art area. We have been experimenting with ways in which we can create pictures using many different resources.

One of our favourite activities was dipping balloons in paint to create a very colourful picture! We tied string to the balloons and had great fun bouncing them in the paint and then on to the paper.

“Ha, it bounced on my nose, I have a red rudolf nose!”

”The balloons are all the colours now!”

We then got the big brushes out and used them on the shower curtain to further develop our gross motor skills.

“Look, I’ve made a pretty rainbow!”

The rain made all the colours run together, we had fun brushing the puddles and guessing what colours it would make!

”Its pink now!”

The children always enjoy when the spray bottles come out! This time we filled them with watery paint. We hung the shower curtain up and used the spray bottles to design a picture!

“It looks so pretty now!”

The children also really enjoy the large rollers we have for painting in the garden. They love rolling them in the paint and seeing what patterns they can create when rolled on the paper.

“Wow, it looks like a train track!”

Finally today in the garden we tied paper cups to sting and hung them from a stick. The cups had holes in the bottom to allow paint to come out when the children were swinging them. This proved to be messy but super fun!

“Ahhh, the paint nearly got me!”

There are so many ways to enjoy outdoor art whilst developing the children’s gross motor skills. This is enhancing their coordination, balance and body control. These activities encourage the children to use larger muscle groups and helps with their physical development.

Article 31 – you have the right to play.

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Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy

Slime recipe

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I’m sure you are all aware that the children have been making slime. We have been learning the recipe and would love to share it with you so maybe you could try it at home.


In the mornings the children have been disagreeing about what to make at our malleable area. Some want to make play dough and others want to make slime. So we came up with a  way to vote to make it fair for everyone.  Everyone who wants to will vote by putting a tally mark in the box using the pictures to help. The box with the majority wins for the day.

“4 people want to make slime already”

“Only 1 choose playdough”

“Slime won”


They start by independently collecting all the equipment and ingredients  needed.

~ First step is to fill the jug with water

~ Add one cup of Pva glue to the bowl

~ Add equal parts water to the bowl

~Add 1 level tsp of Bicarbonate of soda

~Food colouring of your choice (optional)

~Add small amounts of contact lense solution (Asda one seems to work best) at a time.

~Mix until all ingredients combine and start to pull away from the bowl

~Knead until it not sticky. (This part is messy, the best way to get it off your hands is to roll the palm of your hand on a flat surface, it will gather and become stretchy like rubber rather than sticky.
The children learn so much from such a simple experience. Their fine motor skills are developing as they use their hand muscles to squeeze, roll and stretch the slime in different ways.

They are expanding their vocabulary as they describe the slime, what colour it is, what it feels like etc.

They are following instructions/recipes, measuring ingredients, colours, shapes…

…The list goes on.

“This is the best day ever”

Literacy, Snack

Mini Master Chefs Soup Edition 👨‍🍳 👩‍🍳

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Following on from our Mini Master Chef classes, the children have been making their own healthy soup for snack using the soup maker that Beth gifted to us.

We have been continuing to develop the different skills and techniques learned to cut and peel vegetables as well as learning new words to add to our expanding vocabulary and how to keep safe while in the kitchen.

 “I’m using the claw shape to cut the carrots”

“We need to cut the potatoes in to small cubes, it’s called dice”

They put all the vegetables into the soup maker before adding the stock and of course having a little taste of some carrot.

“ The stock adds flavour”


“Will we make  ‘Smooth’ or ‘Chunky’ soup?”

“SMOOOOTH!!”

We have changed the recipe slightly each time we have made soup to let the children taste a variety of different flavours, they explore the different vegetables using their senses.

“It’s very heavy and bumpy”

“Ewww the onion stinks”

“ The carrot looks like a snowman’s nose”


“This soup is Delicious”

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy

Introducing helicopter stories 🚁

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Helicopter stories allows children to become familiar with the role of being an author, illustrator, actor, character, audience and performing.

The start of the process is to use their imagination to think of their story and support can be given to scribe, introducing the concept of being an author and ‘writing’ their own story.

Next follows the role of becoming the ‘illustrator’ creating a picture to go along with their story….developing their mark making skills.

Next we have to move the furniture and create our stage for the children to perform, introducing the concept of a stage and where the audience should sit to support and watch their friends perform.

As the children perform, we can introduce the concept of characters and their friends are there as the audience,  if they need any help and support telling their story.

This is a story about ‘A crabby crab’

This is a performance about a ‘turtle’

Children are excited to create their stories and gain confidence in performing for their friends. We can change the process slightly for our younger children.  We are developing our literacy skills and using our imaginations to create wonderful stories 🥰🥰🥰

Article 28 You have the right to an education

Creativity, Froebel, Imaginative thinking, Literacy, nature

Clay Play

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The children have been exploring the great benefits of clay since returning to nursery after the holidays.

Clay modelling helps to spark the brain’s creativity and problem solving skills.  The children have been expressing their thoughts and emotions through the clay modelling, boosting their imagination and creativity.

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”The mermaids are stuck in the mud”

Some of the younger children begin by exploring the texture of the clay and quickly realised the imaginative aspects of clay play.

“Ice Cream”

The children squeeze and pinch the clay with their hands, helping to develop their fine motor skills.

“I’m making a snowman.”

The clay provides lots of play based learning, as the children count and sort materials when decorating their clay.

“1,2,3,4……..”

The children use a variety of tools when using clay such as rolling pins and wooden and metal clay tools, ensuring that they keep themselves and others safe when using the tools.

The tools allow the children to roll, cut and make patterns in the clay.

As the children develop their clay skills, they can roll clay into balls to make clay lollipops.

The clay provides a great opportunity for children to express detail in their artwork.

“This is my dog”.

We even created our own Cart Mill Forest!

The clay is a fantastic social activity as the children share ideas and learn from one another.

UNCRC Article 31 Every child has the right to relax and play.

 

Creativity, Expressive Arts, Literacy

Colourful Mondays in the studio 🥰

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Today in the studio some of the children enjoyed a mark making
sensory activity involving lots of cling film and colourful paint.
The older children took pleasure in writing their names and drawing shapes in the squishy paint they also realised by  mixing the colours together they could make secondary ones.  The younger children made patterns with their fingers and delighted in feeling the squishiness of the paint beneath their hands. Some of the children thought that next time they would like to use their feet to see how that felt.

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Later on a few of the children took part in some alphabet printing and  searching for the first letter of their name. We also did a letter hunt in some play foam.  G found a v for her Mums name .

What a lovely busy day we all had today at Cart Mill . I can’t wait to see what exciting activities we get up to over the rest of the week .

 

Creative movement, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Froebel, Imaginative thinking, Literacy

X marks the Spots

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This week in the creative area we have been exploring patterns. We have been using different utensils to create these patterns. Today we used different circular resources from our junk modelling area. We used tubes, corks and lids dipped in paint to make our spotty prints.

We noticed the paper was in the shape of an X. “X marks the spots.”

Meanwhile In our Junk modelling area we were gifted a large box.

We didn’t know what we could do with it. Could we fit inside?

Yes we could it was so big! If X marks the spot maybe we could make a pirate ship! We soon got to work. We used our technology skills to look for ideas for our ship on the iPad.
We decided we needed a pirate flag. We worked together to problem solve how to attach it to our ship.

Once we had secured it with tape and ribbon, we got to work making the windows and shape of the boat.

We used our safety skills to cut the box with scissors.

We needed to paint it next. It was such a huge box it took lots of us to paint it.

One of our children spotted that we can’t have a pirate ship without a steering wheel!

We used paper straws to make “the jaggy bits the pirate captain holds to drive the boat.” We tried lots of different ways to attach the wheel so we could still turn it. Luckily we tried pipe cleaners and it worked!

It was time to set sail on the seas to hunt for pirate treasure! At the writing table, we had the fantastic idea of creating a telescope for our adventures!

At group time today we found a book in the story area about pirates and decided tomorrow we will make a treasure map to give us directions to the treasure.

Our learning experience and ideas went on a journey and crossed all over the nursery today using different areas to add to our initial idea.

We can’t wait to see how our treasure maps turnout and if x really did mark the spot!

Block building, Creativity, Digital Technology, Imaginative thinking, Literacy

Ship Ahoy!!

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Last week in the Discovery Room the children were fascinated with Aeroplanes! This stemmed from one child talking about his Daddy being an engineer for an Airline! The children watched clips of planes landing and then designed and built their own aeroplane using the blocks!

Following on from this, we had a discussion about different modes of transport and today the children decided to design and build their own boat! We looked at clips of different types of boats on the screen and got to work creating our masterpiece!

“This boat needs big sides!”
“Don’t forget a steering wheel!”

Once the Cartmill Cruise Ship was complete the children wasted no time jumping on board and playing in it!

“There’s too many people, it might sink!”

The children used their imaginations and went on holiday to many places from Glasgow to as far away as Canada!

”My Gran goes on a cruise ship!”

When we were in bed sleeping the sea got a bit choppy which the children thought was scary!

”Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

The children then used the iPad to scan the QR code for our five little boats song which they enjoyed singing along to!

Once we had travelled the world in our boat the children decided they wanted to make their own little boats to race in the water tray! It was agreed that tinfoil would create the best boats.

“Tinfoil is light, because it’s light it stays on top of the water!”

“The sides are going up to stop the water going in!”

”Mine is a big boat with a little boat inside!”

The children had great fun racing their boats, they also decided to use empty butter tubs which they discovered also floated and they covered the lids in tinfoil to make a life raft!

“Ah, mine has sunk, my floating bits have come off!”

”Oh no, I have a leak, it’s sprung a leak!”

”There’s been a Tsunami which caused a whirlpool!”

We explained to the children their boats had capsized! They had not heard this expression before so we looked it up on the iPad to show them images of what it meant!

A lot of fun was had by the children starting with them being so imaginative in the block area. Block play encourages the children’s creativity whilst learning to take turns and share materials. They are learning to cooperate whilst playing and communicating with their friends!

Well done to the Cartmill designers and builders!

Article  31 – Children have the right to play.