Tag Archives: #grossmotorskills

Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Splat painting

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Today in the garden we have been splat painting.

The children wanted to use sponges but we couldn’t find any so they decided to search for something else to use. They decided on colourful balls and cotton wool balls.

They selected 4 colours of paint and squeezed them onto a tray and in the bowl of balls, developing their hand muscles.

“I want pink and yellow”

“ blue, orange”

We pegged an old table cloth up and took 5 steps back “1,2,3,4,5”.

The children took turns throwing the balls and cotton balls on to the table cloth, they watched the colours explode and create a lovely painting.

This experience allows us to develop our gross motor skills, improving our hand eye co-ordination, learning how to move our bodies carefully and building their confidence.

 

 

Outdoor Learning

Jump, Jump, Jump!

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In the garden, we have been developing the skill of jumping! Jumping requires power and balance and children can develop this skill by showing they can bend their knees when landing, having their head up looking straight forward and using their arms to balance if they need to.

The children have been demonstrating their jumping skills from a height over a low beam.

They then increased the difficulty and the height of the beam and assessed whether they felt safe or not and as their confidence grew, the children were encouraged to jump from a greater height.

The children were able to guide their learning and decide how high they were able to feel comfortable and felt safe to jump over.

Some children then decided to use their problem solving skills and different materials to create a seesaw with equipment from the obstacle course. The children have decided that the next steps they want to take is practicing balancing and jumping on one foot.

What ways can you develop your jumping and balancing skills at home? Feel free to share your learning with us via twitter @cartmillcentre and email at schoolmail@cartmill.e-renfrew.sch.uk

Article 31: every child has the right to play and take part in a wide range of activities.

Outdoor Learning

Pendulum Painting 🎨

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Today in the garden we have been having lots of fun creating very cool patterns using our gross motor skills and learning about the forces of motion and gravity with a painting technique called pendulum painting.

We started off by looking for resources with holes in them, once collected from around our nursery we started tying string onto the handles and hanging them from the rope. We filled them up with paint, pushing the pendulums watching the paint fall through the holes, each one creating a different pattern.

“This has lots of holes in it.”

”I’m choosing purple because it’s my favourite colour.”

We looked at the patterns made by the paint, we noticed that by swinging the pendulum harder or softer, in different directions and tying the string at different lengths it would create different patterns.

“My one is going super high”

“It’s like a swing.”

“I did a big push and it swings all by itself.”

The children enjoyed pushing the pendulums back and forth to one another and seeing how high they could push them. What a great excuse for some messy play!

Outdoor Learning

Different ways to move our bodies 🤸🏻 🏃‍♂️

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Today in the garden we had lots of fun moving our bodies in different ways and developing our gross motor skills! Gross motor skills are the skills which children develop using their whole body movements.

By increasing movements of their whole bodies, children become more flexible, confident and agile.

The children discovered a different way to cross the beam and move in and out the tyres… on their knees!!

R ” I can jump in and out the tyres”

M, R and P all practiced their balancing skills and demonstrated confidence when crossing the balancing beam on the obstacle course.. well done!!

Balancing helps children to understand concepts such as gravity and helps children to develop better concentration skills.

 

M demonstrated good use of her gross motor skills by balancing on the side of the tyres whilst crossing them. ”If I hold out my arms it helps me to balance”.

G showed confidence, strength and determination to climb up the climbing wall in the garden. She was able to use her hands to help her balance at the top whilst climbing onto the bars at the top with her knees. Well done G! Climbing plays a key role in early childhood gross motor skill development.

 

What ways can you develop your gross motor skills at home or out in the community? Share your pictures with us!

Article 6 : I have the right to live and grow. Article 31: I have a right to relax and play 

 

Outdoor Learning

Outdoors fun!

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This week in the garden, we have been thinking of ways to develop our physical area. We have been working as a team to come up with some suggestions to make it more challenging and interesting.

While doing this, we realised we could add some more things into our obstacle course to focus more on our balancing skills. We talked about what balancing is…

“You freeze, That helps you stay still”

“Put your arms out. That helps you not fall on your face.”

“I can balance like a statue, look!”

“I’m like a flamingo”

This sparked some conversation about being “statues” and how they don’t move because they can “balance”. Think about statues, can they move? Can the wind move a statue?

As the children were becoming more confident with their balancing skills, we explored more tricky ways to practice.

The children found many uses for the tyres in the garden, and ways we could incorporate them into our play to challenge ourselves physically using them.

“Look how super fast I can go”

“I can balance if I lift my feet up!”

“If I put these 2 in front, then that will stop it from toppling over. Look, it worked! I’m a giant!”

Great problem solving everybody!

The children also showed an interest in making their own little chalk obstacle courses too…

“I want to hop! That helps me balance”

“I’m going to do a zig zag. I want to run on it”

Then, to top off a super busy week of physical fun, we played musical statues!

I wonder what we could add into the garden next? Great work everybody!!

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Let’s get creative 🛠

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Today at the tinker table the children have been super busy, we have had so much fun creating using the tools, loose parts and blocks of wood.

To begin with the children were investigating and experimenting with the different tools to see which would work best.

“I’m going to need the saw and hammer.”

After choosing all the resources needed we then got started!

First the children wanted to measure out their fabric, so we used our measuring tapes.

“I’ll draw a line to help measure.”
“I’m going up to number 4.”

The children then carefully hammered the nails into the blocks of wood, joining the pieces together.


“I use the hammer with my dad to fix things in the house”

Next the children used the saw to cut the wood into smaller pieces and carefully sanded down the sharp edges, using our sandpaper tool that the children previously made themselves.


“It’s sharp we need to make it soft.”

”You need to saw very carefully, like this.”

Here is the children’s fantastic pieces of work! Great job everyone 👍🏻

“My giraffe has a very long neck, his name is Max.”

”My airplane goes all the way into the sky.”

”I have made a cheetah.”

The children demonstrated brilliant independence skills as they made their own choices and decisions. The children were encouraged to use the majority of the tools and resources independently while being supervised.

Outdoor Learning

Ball play

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This morning in the garden we have been practising our balls skills.

We started by setting up the baskets in the tyres and playing some basketball. We tried throwing the ball in to the basket and also bouncing it in.

We had great fun trying but some of us found this a little tricky so we decided to practise our throwing skills a bit more.

We practised throwing and catching and also bouncing and catching.  We learned that we need to make sure the other person is ready to catch before throwing and we need to have hands out and keep our eyes on the ball to catch it.

After this we put our skills to use and played cooperatively by making a circle and passing the ball to the person next to us.

We learned that we should throw under arm when passing to a person and we need to alter how hard we throw depending on how far away the other person is.

Brilliant ball work boys and girls ⚽️🏀⛹️‍♂️

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Indoor bug hotel

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This morning the children were exploring the mini beasts in the Discovery room.

They used magnifying glasses to inspect the bugs closer and commented on the different colours, shapes and sizes they could see and then they compared them to the pictures of the bugs.

” This bug is that one because its green and has 4 wings”

The children came up with the idea to build a bug hotel with small and large blocks from our block/construction area.  They worked together as a team to pass each block down the production line until the bug hotel was finished.

They tried to fit inside the bug hotel with the bugs but it was too small, so they decided to build a big house for them to fit in.

” this is a big house it fit us in”

 

Expressive Arts

Let’s make music!

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Today in the noisy quiet room the children got creative with the musical instruments. In a small group we started by singing songs and playing our chosen instrument together.  We began to explore beat and tried to copy the beat played by Derek and follow along wile we sang. We all played beautifully and made an excellent band.

“Let’s do old MacDonald had a cat”

“Sing twinkle twinkle”

We then explored how to use the instruments to make different sounds. Learning new words like high pitch and low pitch, and learning how to make the instruments sound noisy or quiet.

“Twinkle twinkle is a quiet song play it just a little”

Then the group got creative and invented their own songs. We had “it’s time to go to bed song”,  “The snake in the hat song” and the “bumped the head song”.  They were superb!

We all demonstrated good turn taking and swapped our instruments  in the group so that everyone got a turn at playing something different. We all had lots of fun and can’t wait till we can do it again.

Expressive Arts

Exploring the tinker table

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Today the children were exploring the different tools and wood at the tinker table and planned out what they were going to make and what tools they would need to make it.

“ I want to make a boat”

We discussed the safety rules we need to follow when using the tools and what we need to wear to keep our hands and eyes safe.

”We need to wear safety gloves”  “and goggles”


The children collected the things that they needed and got to work.

”I need some wood and a hammer and nails” “and some glue”

The nails are all different sizes so they had to measure against the wood to make sure the nail didn’t stick out the other end.

“I need different shapes of wood for my boat like the round bit for the sail, I need to glue it though because it’s too long”

“I want to use the hammer” “ This ones a bit tricky though”

They explored the different woods, some were softer than others.

The children are developing their hand eye co-ordination as they hammer the nails in to the wood.

“I want to saw this bit of wood”

When using the saw we mark on the wood with a pen which bit we would like to cut on so that it’s clearer to see the cut. Sawing takes large muscle movements when moving it back and forwards and develops Gross motor skills. “That was hard work”.