Tag Archives: loose parts

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!

3D number fun!

Today we had lots of fun exploring the loose parts and creating our own 3D numbers. The children loved using resources throughout the room to help them write our number board out, and help with numbers that were a little tricky.

 

The children were very creative, using different loose parts to express their own interpretation of numbers. We spoke about the different shapes in numbers, and how we could display it on our board.

“I need two lines for number 11”

”I need a circle shape for number 10”

Some of the children then extended their learning even further by suggesting finding the corresponding  numbers to match their 3D creations. What a fabulous idea 💡

Have a look at some of our creations we made. Well done everyone!!

The children loved using their imagination and being creative with the loose parts, I wonder what we can create next?

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?

Maths Week Scotland in the Discovery

This week is Maths Week Scotland. The children in the Discovery room are showing off their number recognition skills.

“We can match the pebbles with the numbers”


They decided to use our loose parts box to match the parts with the numbers eg. “It’s number 7, we can use 7 pebbles”

”what about sea shells, 1,2…6,7”

Loose parts are not just shells and pebbles, they are open ended resources meaning they can be used for anything, counting, sorting, making patterns, transient art. The list goes on.


The children then decided to sort the numbers in order from 1-9, they worked together to swap them round until in the right order.

“Put the 5 next to 4 and 7”

”Number 3 is upside down”