The children were amazing today performing for the parents and family members who had come along to watch in our garden.
We loved having the ponies, Annabelle and Eddie to join us.
The children got the chance to feed them and their favourite snack is carrots.
The children give us year-round joy and it was so lovely to have our parents and families here with us today to share in that joy.
Today in the home room the children have been busy making their very own Christmas tree ornaments using salt dough and their own creative skills!
We demonstrated good social skills by working together to carefully measuring the ingredients and adding them to a bowl to mix.
We exercised our manipulative and fine motor skills and we strengthened our muscles through lots of mixing, kneading, rolling and cutting our dough.
We listened carefully and demonstrated we are very careful when using an oven as it can get very hot! We baked our dough shapes in the oven to make them hard.
We decorated our decorations with our own choice of coloured paint, glitter and snow dust. We then tied some beautiful ribbon to them so we can hang them on our tree,
This morning the children were making chocolate cookies with the play dough. They have been showing an interest in role play, so this lead us to a discussion about different senses we could explore .
The children used their sense of smell to test and compare the various flavours. We tested cocoa powder, peppermint, salted caramel, ginger, orange and lemon.
Ginger – “gingerbread man , Nannas house”
Peppermint – “mint choc chip”
Cocoa powder – “Christmas pudding and cookies
The children then independently made their own playdough using their favourite scent.
The children then explored with their playdough and decided to make lots of different shaped cookies and candy canes for Santa. They used the home corner to put them in the oven to bake.
Santa arrived in our Garden today and gave all of the children a present. He also left presents for the children who were not here. Santa loved our Garden and he said it was the best one he had visited this year so far. 
Thank you Santa from everyone at Cart Mill Family Centre.
Today some of the children in the discovery room wanted to make an explosion. We decided to try and make one using lemons and tangerines. We placed the orange and tangerine onto a plate and then took the tops off and squished the insides of the fruit to bring out some of the juice. We then squeezed some washing up liquid into the juice and added some food colouring and a teaspoonful of baking soda. After we did this, we watched as the fruits exploded with colourful bubbles! It was so exciting!!
We talked about the science and how the experiment worked. Citrus fruit contains citric acid which has a chemical reaction when it mixes with the baking soda due to form carbon dioxide, which is a gas. Once the citric acid and the baking soda have neutralised each other the reaction stops and no more gas is made. The children had so many things to say about the experiment including:
“ I think the lemon has more citrus acid in it than the tangerine because the lemon has bigger bubbles”
“I want my explosion to be rainbow colours”” Look the blue and red has turned black”
“I need more baking powder I want a big explosion “ “ It feels slimy if you touch it” “The lemon smells nice”
We really enjoyed participating in this fun science activity.
Over the last few months the children in the Discovery room have been practising their skills at the Tinker Table work bench. The children have learned the rules of the Tinker Table and why these rules are very important to follow for their safety. They created a rule book for the Tinker Table work bench to encourage them and others to put on gloves and safety goggles when using the tools in the tool box.
The children have been learning to use hammers and saws properly as well as learning that there are different types of saws and hammers used for different jobs. The claw hammer has been popular for creating pieces using nails as well as the children learning that the claw can remove nails. The children’s saw skills have really flourished as they now know how to hold the hacksaw properly and use their body weight to make the saw move through the wood.
With the children’s skills improving at the work bench so too did their understanding of how to better construct their creations. The children decided that they wanted to introduce glue to the Tinker Table and with that came wonderfully creative pieces.
The children have now progressed on to drawing a plan first of what they would like to create. They are looking online at images, drawing it, then thinking of how to create it with the resources at the Tinker Table.
A wonderful plan producing a fabulous rocket.
The children’s pieces have all been displayed in the Tinker Table Gallery for several months now. The children decided that they wanted to close the gallery in December and take their exhibits home to stay. I hope you are looking forward to seeing how creative your child has been at the Tinker Table workbench this year.
Just a gentle reminder to please wear a face covering when dropping of and picking up your child. Let’s keep everyone safe.
Today in our garden we have been super busy! The children have worked hard as team to create a fairy garden! Firstly they painted the wooden logs their favourite colour, we then explored the garden to see what other resources we could use then got started, creating it all by themselves using a variety of natural loose parts, Well done!
The children then decided they’d like to make a potion made from a mixture of water, mud, acorns , grass and leaves. They had lots of fun!
The mud kitchen is a very popular area in our garden. It is an exciting, messy and creative area to play in. The children experience sensory and imaginative play as well as developing skills in numeracy, science, interaction and communication. I wonder what they will make next time!
Today in the Studio Room we had a very special musical morning. Our music teacher Lindsey came to show us some instruments and play musical games with us.
First we warmed up by standing up and singing and joining in with reindeer Hokey Cokey.
We sang a variety of other songs using our voices to sing and our bodies to join in with the actions.
We had good fun learning new songs some of us hadn’t heard before and playing new musical games.
We did sing a few Christmas songs we had already been practicing so it was nice to show Lindsey how well we have been learning our songs.
Lindsey brought some scarfs for us to use to take part in snowball dancing. We enjoyed using our expressive movements.
Then we got to choose which instruments we wanted to use from Lindsays collection that she brought along for us. There was a lot to choose from.
We played a game of Simon says, using the musical instrument. It was lots of fun and we had to listen out for the instructions.
We all really enjoyed our musical morning, learning new skills to broaden our expressive arts.
We are looking forward to next week to see what else Lindsey will teach us.
The children have been learning about different types of technology recently so we thought it would be a good idea to introduce Chromebooks. First of all we spoke about staying safe online and always have an adult with you when you are searching for information.
We then discussed what they know about chrome books and also what we would use them for.
“It’s like a tablet and a computer”
” we use them to watch videos and play games”
”that looks like my tablet at home”
We spoke about what we would like to use the Chrome books for and decided that we would like to find out some more information about our favourite animals..
Cats and parrots were the most popular 🐱 🦜 so we went online to see what we could find out.
We used the keyboard to search for information, recognising some of the letters in our names as we typed.
We found out lots of information about parrots
“there are lots of different colours of parrot and some even talk”
Then we looked for information about cats
“boy cats are called tom”
We found out lots of new information about our favourite animals which we saved. We can’t wait to show our friends what we found out and how to use the chrome books.
