Tag Archives: home room

Scrumptious Snack

Here at Cart Mill Family Centre our children are very independent when having their snacks. Our children are encouraged to show their independence skills from start to finish during the duration of the snack experience.

First the children choose what they would like to have for snack. Today we chose apples, bananas and cucumbers.
Our children are very clever and they help to prepare the snack for everyone by cutting it up.

We are very careful of our fingers when using the knife to cut the fruit.

Our children from 2-5 all have the opportunity to help prepare snack. By encouraging independence and using our fine manipulative skills to cut the snack is a great learning opportunity for our children to gain confidence from a young age.

We used different tools to help us prepare snack such as the apple corer. We had to push down hard. It was quite tricky at first.


We filled up the water and milk jugs and set up our table ready to invite our friends to join us for snack. We know the importance of washing our hands before we eat.

We collect our own cups and plates from the trolley before choosing our seat.

Our snack table is all self service and is a free flow snack which allows children to come as they please and have a leisurely snack experience which develops our social skills as we sit together having conversations with our peers.

Using the tongs helps our fine manipulative skills while saving on the germs.


We pour our own drinks and choose what we want. If some our younger children need help our older ones are always on hand to help. Once we finish our snack we take our plate and cup over to the skink to rinse it and pop it in the dish rack for the staff to help with the washing dishes.


We are very clever here at Cart Mill. The children have picked this routine up very quickly with our younger children now showing these skills and are enjoying the chance to become independent.

Let me tell you a story…….

In our story area this month our children have been having fun using the puppets to tell stories.
We went to the Studio room to get a box to repurpose and turn it into a puppet theatre. We picked the perfect box and got to work designing in.

We have used our imagination to create stories using the puppets and put on a show for our audience.

The children have had so much fun putting on these puppet shows and have made up some wonderful stories using their imaginative story telling skills.
We even added in some teddies who wanted to be one of the characters of our show.

We used finger puppets, teddies and hand puppets as part of our show.

Puppets are a great way to bring our stories to life. Our younger children also have great enjoyment using the puppets while In the story area.

We can use the puppets to help us re tell the story and help us with our literacy adding new words to our vocabulary.

Using puppets is a great way for our youngest children to get the most of of the story and help them build on their concentration skills.

Using the puppet story sacks is great way to help our children of all ages become familiar with the story and help them develop an awareness of characters and build on their recall and retell skills. One of our favourite story sacks is currently “Dear Zoo”. We enjoy matching which animal the zoo sent us.

Our story area is a fantastic place for our children to develop their literacy skills and go on a story adventure. We can  choose our own books…..

We can choose fiction books…..

or factual  books

We can read and listen to stories with the adults…..

or read them alongside our friends.

Next time you are here for stay and play why don’t you come and visit our lovely literacy story area.

Our emotions😀😢🤪😱🫣🥱😡😳

This week at the malleable area the children have been using their creative imaginations to mould our play dough into different things.

“I made a big worm, I rolled it with my hands”
“look I made my ear in the play dough, I lied down like this”

”I made a smiley face”

The smiley face sparked a conversation about the different faces we could make.

”can I show you my silly face”

The children used the iPad to take a picture of the different faces they could make, they even took a picture of Carly’s silly face but we won’t bore you with that.

Each child made a different face and we discussed what they were and why we might feel these ways. Using facial expressions we can begin to learn and recognise different feelings and emotions that we can feel and find solutions to understanding and dealing with them.

”some of the new boys and girls get sad faces when they just come to nursery, now they have happy faces”

We will continue exploring emotions in different ways at the malleable table, it is a very important way of communication especially for children as they don’t often understand their feelings.

Sharing stories in spring

Today in the Home room was all about stories. We enjoy exploring stories together in our story area.
We like sharing stories together in different ways. We can share stories as part of a group, listening to a story being read by an adult.

When we read stories together, we are learning about taking turns, when to talk and when to listen, learning new vocabulary and sharing our thoughts and feelings as part of a group.
Today we discussed all things Spring during our story. We read about big and little nut brown hare sharing their ideas about Spring. We discussed our ideas and found out it’s “when the sun gets a little warmer” and “I know it’s Spring because it’s my mummy’s birthday in Spring”.
We can also explore stories with our friends, forming our own ideas about what the story can be about from looking at the pictures. If we recognise the book we can use our recall skills to retell the story.

Sometimes we can use visual aids to help us read a story. Visual aids such as puppets are a great way for our visual learners to interact with the story. Today the Gruffalo was helping read the story all about his adventures in the deep dark wood.

Sometimes we don’t even need a book to tell a story. We can use our imagination with different visual aids to bring our own stories to life, such as puppet shows.

We can also use role play to act out as characters from familiar stories, our become our own characters.
Story telling has so many learning opportunities for our children, it’s great to tell these stories in a way that captures the interests of our individual children.

What way do you like to share stories together at home?

Inspiring creations with playdough

Today in the Home room we have enjoyed spending time at the playdough station.  We have learned lots of different skills while we manipulate the dough into wonderful creations. We used a variety of loose parts to inspire our creative thought and design processes.

First we made the playdough. The children asked for purple playdough. We decided to use our colour mixing skills to make purple by mixing red and blue paint together.

“First we need blue”

“Then red”


“Look what’s happened when we mixed them together. It’s purple”

After we had made our playdough, we began to let out our imaginations flow, creating our playdough masterpieces.


“I made a sun”

”Look it’s a unicorn”

“It’s a star wars alien space ship with lasers that are flying”

“It’s a face and the dark purple is the hair”

“I’m using the stones to make a happy face”.

We have been engaging fully with our learning today, building new skills are proud to show everyone what we created.

I wonder what we will make tomorrow with the playdough?