Category Archives: Outdoor Learning

Outdoor fun!!

The children had great fun in the garden today. They were stacking the crates to see how high they could jump from! This enabled the children to push themselves physically whilst developing their gross motor skills.


“I can do it myself!”     “Look how high I can jump!”    “1,2,3 JUMP!”

The children really enjoyed climbing, jumping and challenging themselves!

We then got the parachute out for some fun and singing! We put our little star on the parachute and sang twinkle twinkle little star! We tried hard to keep the star from jumping off!

We then lifted the parachute high in the air and took turns to run under it.  “It looks like a big balloon in the sky!”

The children wanted to put a bouncy ball on the parachute and roll it around fast to see how long we could keep it on for! We practiced our counting and kept it on till we got to twenty! Great job!

Finally, the children needed a rest so we sang sleeping bunnies whilst they lay under the parachute. We threw it up in the air and the children loved bouncing around under it like bunnies!

We had so much fun in the garden today.

 

The water cycle 🌦

This morning the children have enjoyed revisiting the ice gardens that they made last week. They could see the different layers within the ice and noticed that the ice was starting to melt in the sun.
“The sun is hot today.”
”The ice is melting!”
We discussed the different properties of water and this led to a discussion about where water comes from. I explained to the children that all the water on our planet continuously moves in a cycle. The sun dries up the rain and sends the vapour up to the sky where the cold air turns it in to clouds. Then once the clouds are full the water comes back to earth as rain.
We then created our own rain clouds.

We used shaving foam to represent the clouds then dropped food colouring on top to represent the rain. This is a great visual for the children to see the cloud filling up before it starts to rain. The children then  experimented with adding more drops and also used different colours to see what would happen.

“It’s raining!”
“It looks like an explosion!”

“I mixed them together and now it looks like coffee.”
”Look, the orange is falling!”

The children had a great time taking part in our science experiment to learn about the water cycle. I’m sure we will be repeating this experience again in the near future.
Why don’t you try this with your budding scientists at home and share your experience on our twitter page @cartmillcentre

A Day at the Beach!

The recent sunny weather made the children think of summer days at the beach! They set up an area of the garden and made their very own beach! They used the big blue blanket as the sea and the yellow blanket was the sand!

First the children went for a swim in the sea and they gave me the very important job of being the lifeguard!

“I can swim so fast!”      “Ah, a shark is coming!”

The children then collected shells from the sea and took them to the beach for a closer look!

“My shell is so soft!”    “Look, I can hear the sea in mine!”

The children then decided it would be good fun to jump into the sea!
“Look how high I jump!”
We made big splash noises when we landed in the sea!

Using the crates the children pretended they were in pirate ships bouncing on the sea! “Ahoy captain!” They had someone standing on lookout! “Watch out for the tornado!!”, “It’s coming!!”

The children could see pirates coming so decided to build a bigger boat for themselves!   “We can hide in this!”,  “This boat is awesome!”

What great imaginations the children at Cart Mill have. They had great fun through role play and made up a whole story about their time at the beach! They really had great fun whilst developing their communication and  language skills. Role play allows the children to act out and make sense of real life situations which they really enjoyed doing.

Frozen gardens

It’s science week at Cart Mill and we have been discussing the properties of water and the effect of the cold. We found out during our visit from Williamwood that water is a liquid and that it can move about in a container.

We gathered some containers and used scissors to cut up some foliage to add before we poured the water in, then off to the freezer we went.

The next day we were surprised by the appearance of the water “it’s gone hard” “it’s cold” The water had changed from a liquid – something that can move about in the container, to a solid – something that doesn’t move in the container. When the temperature of the water becomes very cold (below freezing) it turns to ice.

The children decided to add colour to the water, so, very carefully we used droppers to add some dye “it’s getting  darker”

 

The children wondered what would happen if we added more water to our ice. We added another layer of foliage and coloured water on top of our ice. The water sat like a different layer on top of the ice, it was very strange, the water moved but the ice didn’t! We all wondered what would happen if we put the container back in the freezer so off to the kitchen we went with our containers. What will happen? Watch this space…

Hot and Cold “what happens ?”

What happens to water when it’s freezing cold?
Freezing happens when molecules of liquid get so cold that they slow down enough to hook onto each other to form a solid crystal. We watched this happen in slow motion on our iPads.  It thought it looked like crocodiles, birds or leaves. We then made our own ice cubes, we poured the water into the trays and placed it in the freezer.

The ice cubes are sticky and cold. I see patterns inside them . They melt in my hand but they are still cold ..

That was something cold but what about hot things? What happens when you add heat to popcorn?

Popcorn pops because each kernel has a tiny bit of water inside it. When the kernels are heated up to the point where it exerts enough pressure, the kernel bursts open. The soft material inside puffs up as it explodes. This then cools and forms the odd shapes we know and love to eat.

The shapes got the children discussing some safety rules; “it is very hot”, “we wouldn’t touch it”. Then they started to chat about what shapes and textures had been produced. “Mine looks like a horse.”  “I found the seed, it is hard.” “My popcorn is crispy.”

As the popcorn comes from seeds we have decided to plant them and grow our own popcorn plant! We have put the seeds in the green house. Let’s see what happens next!

We have had a lot of fun today trying out our experiments for science week and learnt lots of new information. We have lots of different experiments to try out throughout the week and we cannot wait!

Imaginative play in the garden

Today in the garden the children had great fun using our giant polydron pieces.

They checked out some pictures for inspiration before drawing up their own plans.

The children worked really well as a team to create various designs, developing their problem solving skills and communicating their ideas.

“we made a train, all aboard “

“look at our house”

The possibilities are endless and through polydron activities it will help them to grow and develop to their full potential.

Bowling fun in the Garden!

One of our children was telling us about the amazing fun they had ten pin bowling with their family! They were so excited to have won the game and wanted to share their story! We decided to make our own bowling game for the garden which the children were very excited about! First we put some water in bottles to stop the bottles blowing over in the wind! The children chose different colours of food colouring to make the bottles brighter!

We gave the bottles a good shake to mix the colours!
”They are rainbow bottles!”

The children then set the bottles out like skittles in a bowling alley!

”They are in a triangle!”

We then had great fun throwing different sized balls at the bottles to see how many we could knock down! The children noticed that the bigger balls hit over more skittles!

“It’s a strike to hit them all, I play it on my Nintendo Wii!”
The children showed off their bowling knowledge! Some have been ten pin bowling and others have played it at home!

The children kept a record on the wall using chalk of the number of bottles they knocked over using tally marks. They had so much fun whilst developing their gross motor and numeracy skills! I think Cart Mill has some future bowlers amongst us!

Balancing skills

This morning in the garden we have been working on our balancing skills. We used loose parts to create our Muddy Movers course which helps us strengthen and improve our gross motor skills. We are becoming very confident in our balancing skills, so we decided it was time to make the course a little more challenging! We had a look in our cupboard and found some bean bags and some egg and spoons! We decided to challenge ourselves and see if we could balance the beanbags on our heads and the egg on the spoon as we walked around the course.

We started by discussing what it means to be balanced;

“It means you don’t wobble.”

“You need to practice.”

”You put your hands out to help.”

The course is designed in a way that helps us to assess our own risk and abilities.

We like to use our loose parts to make changes to our course every day. We can choose to walk along the plank on the ground or if we are feeling confident, we can step up and walk along the bridge.


By keeping a beanbag on our heads, this encourages us to keep our heads up, or the beanbag will fall off! This helps us improve our balancing skills.

We had to walk really carefully to make sure the egg didn’t fall off the spoon!

We demonstrated excellent balancing today! We were getting faster and more confident each time we competed the course.

We had so much fun!

Snow much fun!!

We were so excited to see so much snow in our Cart Mill garden today.  We had so much fun investigating how deep it was and how it felt to touch. We even made a Snow Angel!

“It’s cold. I’m picking it up and making a snowball.”

We are so lucky to have a large open space next to our garden with lots of hills which are perfect for sledging!

“I was going so fast”.

We had so much fun racing down the hill to see who could go the fastest! Sami joined in too but we reached the bottom before she did!

Next it was off to the Spider Park.  We decided to call it the Snow Park today!

We had so much fun playing snow tig and making snowballs!

We demonstrated excellent teamwork by pulling each other on the sledge round the Snow Park.  It was hard work!

Of course we have to make a Snowman on a snowy day!  We worked together to roll our large snowballs and found some sticks to use as arms. We made a big snowman and a little snowman.

“This is his head”  ” He has arms.”

After all our hard work it was time for snack. Of course we had to have some hot chocolate to warm us up!

We had snow much fun today!

There’s no stopping us….

It may have been freezing rain, intermittent hail stones and blowing a hoolie but the children at Cart Mill weren’t going to let that stop them playing outdoors!

We started by having a chat about how to keep warm while playing outdoors and discussed what games we would like to play. The children asked to play banana tig and toilet tig.


If the tigger catches you in banana tig you have to put your hands above your head like a banana skin and you cannot move until a friend ‘peels’ the banana.


If the tigger catches you during toilet tig you have to stand with your arm out and cannot move until a friend ‘ flushes’ the toilet.

These types of games encourage turn taking and co-operation between the children.

The children then asked to play hide and seek and got very creative with their hiding places!

We had a great time keeping ourselves active during Storm Dudley.