Tag Archives: halloween

Expressive Arts

Let’s get creative🎃

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From all the excitement of halloween last night the children were chatting with one another saying what they dressed up as. They had a brilliant idea and decided to use the junk modelling to create what they had dressed up as.


“I’m going to cover the box all orange.”
“Hedwig needs feathers and glue.”

Here is the children’s fantastic work!


“I dressed up as a pumpkin last night, like this.”
“I made Hedwig  because I was Hermione.”
“I dressed up as a train driver, this is my train.”

Through the week the children have also been super busy working together creating “halloween houses”.

“This looks like my house.” 
“I’m going to put my handprints on it.”

The children absolutely love spending time in the studio, it is an essential part of every child’s  learning, it allows them to think creatively, problem solve, explore, work independently or as a group and develop their fine motor skills as well as many more.

Baking, Block building, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Snack, Special Event

Happy Halloween 🎃

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It’s a Hallowe’en fangtastic day here at Cart Mill. We have taken part in a variety of autumn learning experiences across each of our play rooms and garden.

We made spooky mud pie potions in our mud kitchen.

We also turned our water tray into a witches and wizards’ caldron using food colouring, shaving foam and different sized containers to create more potions.

We had opportunities to create Hallowe’en coloured crafts in our gross motor art area

In our Home Room we sang Hallowe’en songs and made Frankenstein’s green and purple sparkle playdough. We used our fine motor skills and imagination to mould our playdough into different shapes.

In the baking area we made witches fingers for snack (breadsticks with pumpkin seeds) it sounds like a yummy spooky snack.

In our Discovery Room we made a spooky block castle, using our creative and problem solving skills.

We also had our pumpkin potion experiment in our science area using our investigation and discovery skills.

And finally, in our Studio Room we were making Halloween houses, painting with our hands and creating wonderful pictures.

Some of our children came to nursery dressed up, here is a showcase of some of our many spooktacular costumes…..

Happy Halloween to all our families. 👻🎃👻🎃

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Cornflour Creations

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Throughout the week the children have been getting very excited about Halloween so today we decided to incorporate this in to the sensory area. We put some cornflour on the trays and selected a variety of mark making tools. Then we set about making our creepy creations…


“I’m making triangle eyes.”

“I’m making a spooky pumpkin with one circle eye and one triangle eye.”

“I’m making a spider and he’s coming after you!”

 


One of the boys experimented with moving the flour with the stick and realised he had made a bat wing! We experimented some more and worked out how to make two wings. He then took his time looking at the bat toy and added more features like a head and feet. Excellent work!


Some of the other children experimented with tracing around the Halloween toys and created some excellent pictures.

“I’m making a spider with only two legs and a pumpkin on his head.”

“My pumpkin has a silly face.”

Fantastic mark making and creativity skills from the children today!

Article 31- Every child has the right to take part in a wide range of cultural and artistic activities.

 

Expressive Arts

Hallowe’en Art🎃

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Inspired by everyone’s Halloween costumes, the children decided they would like to create their own Hallowe’en art.

First of all the children picked their own materials to make their art, varying from black and orange coloured ribbon to Hallowe’en sequins and craft tissue paper in different shapes and sizes.

They then used scissors to cut the card to their preferred size and selected glue and glue spreaders.

“ I want black and orange card, they’re Hallowe’en colours”

”mines looks like a spooky Hallowe’en spider” 🕷

“I’m going to hang mine up like decorations”

The children have been very creative and have made fabulous pieces of Hallowe’en art.  Happy Hallowe’en everyone🎃


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Halloween sensory play

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Today we were exploring our senses and developing our motor skills in our Autumn/Halloween sensory tray. We are getting in the Halloween spirit. 👻🎃

This is a great experience for our youngest children to get in and explore different sensations on their hands and develop their hand muscles . For our older children it’s a great way to develop their fine motor skills and writing skills as they can use their fingers or a tool such as a pencil, paint brush, or other item to draw, write letters, or form numbers in the sensory tray.


“I’m drawing a pumpkin in the orange rice”

We added some cornflakes, pasta, leaves, conkers and some spooky halloween characters. We then added paintbrushes and tweezers to see what we could do with them.

”see I can pick the conker up”

“I can get the skeleton”


“it feels hard and crunchy”

”It sounds like rain at night time”

The children then used the buckets as cauldrons and made their own  witches brew while telling spooky halloween jokes.

Expressive Arts

Cart Mill’s Creepy Cabin

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The children have had great fun this week working together to create a spooktacular creepy cabin.


We started on Tuesday by making spiders using pine cones and pipe cleaners. The children used their fine motor skills to cut the pipe cleaners and also to slot them into the pine cones, great work guys!


On Wednesday the boys and girls designed their own spooky pumpkin face using a variety of 2D shapes. The final result looks fantastic and very spooky!


Thursday involved making leaf ghosts. The children had fun painting the leaves and chatting about whether they were making happy, angry or scary ghosts.


Today we made witches hats and draw a variety of Halloween images on the points of them.


And here is Cart Mill’s Creepy Cabin! A collaboration of many fantastic pieces of work. Our spooky pumpkin in the corner, spiders, ghosts and witches hats hanging all around and even some broomsticks in the corner.
Absolutely fantastic work from all the boys and girls, well done!
🎃👻🧙‍♀️🕷👏

Expressive Arts

Pumpkin Seeds

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Today we reminded ourselves of our story. Pumpkin Jack. It was time to open our pumpkin and see what was inside ?.  “Its seeds”

The children enjoyed scooping the seeds out the pumpkins. They had great conversations about how slippy and slimy the whole process was. We gathered lots of seeds to make pictures.

The children were very create designing their own styles of pictures. We all picked our own paper, glue, pens and pencils . Using these resources helps the children develop their fine motor skills. “ I am making a big pumpkin “ and “ mine will have lots of seeds inside it”. We have some lovely pictures to take home , we hope you enjoy them as much as we did creating them.

 

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Can you make a spooky pumpkin?

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We have been learning about shapes in nursery and put this learning to use today to make a spooky pumpkin. We started by painting a pumpkin using chalk paint then discussed what shapes we could use to make a spooky face.


How it started….


“He needs a long nose.”


“We can use different shapes for each eye.”


“I used a circle and a triangle.”


“I’m making a monster pumpkin.”


…the finished article.

The children decided to make one eye a circle and one a rectangle then also drew a triangle inside the rectangle to make it even spookier! They made a zig zag mouth using triangles and also gave the pumpkin some curly hair. What a brilliantly spooky pumpkin, great team work everyone!

Literacy

Pumpkin Soup!

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In the garden , the children have been discussing Halloween and have been intrigued by pumpkins especially!

After we discussed what we could do with pumpkins we had a great idea of making pumpkin soup!


We collected lots of different ingredients we wanted to add to our yummy soup!

 

we even added some red food colouring to give it a nice colour!

Once the soup was made we sat down together and ate it all up… yum yum!!

Expressive Arts

Halloween Sensory Play

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Today the children used pipettes to draw up coloured ink and then dropped it onto the paper. They then used a straw to blow patterns. The children noticed the colours changing as the inks merged. They also noticed that the ink behaved differently on different materials eg “ It’s more watery on the tin foil” “ It doesn’t make patterns on the bubble wrap”

The children talked about the colours they were using and which was their favourite they were able to work together and showed great turn taking skills waiting for their turn of the pipettes.

In preparation for Halloween the children asked for something slimy and gooey to explore. The children decided that jelly would be best. The toddlers helped to make the jelly on Thursday  evening, they measured and stirred following my instructions closely. The children then  hid some natural autumnal items and some not so natural inspired by Halloween in the jelly.

The children used all five senses to explore the jelly. Some used tweezers to take the objects out of the jelly developing their fine motor skills, others dived straight in with their hands.  The children used lots of descriptive language. “”So sticky and cold””Jelly is delicious “ I’ve got an orange jelly” “I see a pumpkin “”This one has a pine cone in it” “This jelly feels good it’s wobbly and wet” “A bug it’s hard and black” “let’s see how many flowers we can get out”” I see three spiders they are tiny”.