Tag Archives: Story time

Great Garden Adventures – fun the sun ☀️

Bonjour every one. It’s been a great start to our new term in our garden. The sun has been shining and we have been taking part in lots of outdoor activities.

We are so pleased to see our returning children back again and also to meet lots of new friends who have joined us at Cart Mill. We had lots of happy faces this week.

In our garden this week we have been adapting some of our areas. We have our mud kitchen where we have added a table, chairs, jugs, pots and pans. We have also added in a water jug for children to self select some water to enhance their role play experience.

We haven’t got a name for our mud kitchen yet. I wonder what we will call it…..

In our gross motor art area we have been exploring pouring, filling and colour mixing using large apparatus and loose parts. We enjoyed using the watering cans to pour the coloured water down the guttering and watch the colours mixing together at the end. We kept fixing the guttering when we had a “leak in the system” we had to work fast to fix it.

We changed our story area to give us a cosy comfortable area to share stories with friends. We love choosing our stories and the most comfortable cushion to sit on.

In our Planting area we have been exploring the seeds of the sunflowers that we had grown. By dissecting the sunflowers and removing the seeds, it allows us to replant them again and grow more sunflowers.

We have loved our stage where we have been dressing up and putting on shows for our audience. We have had lots of renditions of “let it go”.

We have enjoyed our small world areas where we have had mini beasts, farm and sea animals to play with. The children liked the sea animals the best. We made our very own “aquarium”.

We have been mark making at our writing area. We have been making treasure maps and hunting for the X that marks the spot. We have been using our imagination to become pirates searching for the lost treasure, following the clues on our maps.

In our Water area we have continued our pouring and filling and used both large and small piplets to transport water. We’ve enjoyed water play in our warm weather.

In our construction area we have been using the polydron to build wonderful creations such as dens and houses. We added loose parts and material to bring our creations to life. We worked together to problem solve and share our design process.

At our Muddy movers area we have been building and creating our own obstacles course. We have been discussing how to stay safe and risk asses our play.  We have enjoyed balancing, climbing and jumping. The children are enjoying adding different challenge to our obstacle courses.

It’s been so much fun I wonder what will will get up to next week.
Au revior everyone

Superworm at Book Week Scotland 2024

Last week in our playdough area we were celebrating Book Week Scotland by reading “Superworm”.

Engaging with our favourite stories and finding joy in reading helps to strengthen our children’s literacy skills and comprehension abilities whilst having fun. Reading books with our children also helps them to enhance their cognitive abilities such as memory retention, critical thinking and problem solving.

Today we had the curiosity cube in our playdough area and who was inside? Our very own Superworm!

We made pink playdough and had a go at creating our very own Superworm. We used some of our dough disco moves we have been practicing to help us roll the playdough into a sausage to make our Superworm .

We found some googly eyes and some sticky stickers to add to our Playdough just like the real Superworm .

We enjoyed making our Superworm and some of our children even wanted to make lots of friends for Superworm.

We counted them as we made them, promoting our numeracy learning through our play experiences.

Our older children wanted to make different characters from the story. Some children chose their favourite baby toad to create.

We decided to retell the story of Superworm using our playdough creations.  Some of us decided to change the story and create their own.

We had Super worm with his friends, Superworm saving the princess in the castle, Superworm with the zoo animals and Superworm the flying worm.

We shared our ideas with our friends and discussed different characters and events in our story. Storytelling provokes conversations between our children of different ages and stages of development.

Here is a look at some of our own Superworms.

We read the story of Superworm and used Superworm and one of our playdough toads to help retell the story.

“Superworm is super long.”

”Superworm is super strong.”

“watch him wiggle.”

”see him squirm.”

”Hip hip hooray for Superworm.”

I wonder what characters from our favourite stories will be in our curiosity cube tomorrow?  Don’t forget to help yourself to a book at our front door to share with your children at home as part of our Book week Scotland.

World Book Day

We have had lots of fun celebrating World Book Day here at Cart Mill!

We sang our favourite songs and rhymes such a Twinkle Twinkle, Incy Wincy Spider,  Wheels on the Bus and Humpty Dumpty during Book Bug with Emma and Gail.

We had to work together as a team to keep Incy Wincy Spider up in the air! We were so excited to guess what was inside the box and which song we would sing next!

We did lots of bending and stretching following the actions of Head, Shoulders, Knees andToes and Peter Hammer with Gail.

Thank you so much to our parents and children who recorded their favourite stories to share with us.  We really enjoyed watching them on our big screen!

Gail read us a lovely story called the Wonderful World of Weather.  We have chatted about our favourite stories and read some of our favourite books.

Our budding authors have created some potato characters and stories of their own.  Other children have made their favourite characters from books. How many can you recognise?