Month: October 2023

Acorn Room

This week in the acorn room, we have began our halloween celebrations. The children enjoyed exploring halloween colours in our water tray. The children were turn-taking and sharing the different water utensils. The children also enjoyed exploring different textures through playing with lentils, halloween pasta and shredded paper!

Fine motor area

This week in the fine motor areas we have been getting into the Halloween spirit with different sensory bags.  We had find the eye of the pumpkins, put the branches on the spooky trees, give the ghost some eye, find the pumpkins and ghosts and put the pom-poms in the circle 🎃👻

Small world area

This week in the small world area and cosy corner, the children have been transitioning themes across the both areas. Using the theme of dinosaurs, the children, with some inspiration from a story book, made their own dinosaur sleepover! We then decided to have our very own dinosaur sleepover in the cosy corner with mats, blankets, and stories 😴📖 Afterwards, the children then introduced dinosaurs into the doll houses for more imaginative play! All of these ideas originated from the children and they expanded on them themselves to guide their own learning. What an excellent dinosaury week we have all had.

Block play

In the block play area the children were building bridges, they worked together with their peers and made some wonderful bridges for their cars and trains. This developed their team building skills, their fine motor skills, their listening and language skills , all while balancing and stacking the blocks and being creative with their imagination.

Future engineers in the making!

Outdoors

This week in the garden, the children have been developing their gross motor skills using the climbing frame and asking for support when needing help to cross the monkey bars. The children are building on their confidence and independence 

The children have been on a leaf hunt outside, collecting different colours and sizes of leaves. Once collected we made a chart to show our findings. Grouping by colour and size

Art area

The children have been exploring autumn though a sensory tuff tray. We have been exploring using pumpkins, comments, leaves and sticks. 🍂 🎃 🍁.

We have also been doing some fun Halloween activities 🎃 the children used apples and paint to make pumpkin pictures, building on fine motor skills and colour recognition 🎃

STEM area

in the STEM area we have been developing our fine motor skills using loose parts to make our name.

This week we have been celebrating maths week at Oakburn with a focus on shape and motion. Here are some of the exciting things we got up to!

Block Play

During Maths Week children have enjoyed matching the 3D shapes to 2D shapes. We talked about the different properties of 3D shapes and how they have different surfaces. The cylinder has circles at the base and top with the other surface curving round. The cuboid has rectangles.

Block play allows children to experience working with 3D shapes learning about and working with the physical properties.

Acorn Room

This week in the Acorn room to celebrate Maths  Week we have been exploring shape and colours as well as matching.  The children have been using their fine motor skills and coordination to match up the colour to the shapes and also creating their own patterns using the magnetic shapes.

Our little acorns have been learning to recognise shapes. The children were able to sort the dinosaur shape game.  The children identified their favourite shape as they mark maked pictures for their loved ones.

Courtyard

In the courtyard we have been exploring motion as part of Maths week. The children have been building lots of different ramps and rolling cars down them. The children were using their prediction skills to see which car they thought would be fastest. We practiced lots of positional language, talking about heavier and lighter cars, steeper and lower ramps, pushing and pulling our cars and about driving up and down. We tried letting the cars go on their own and then pushing them to see if adding force makes them go faster.

The children enjoyed role playing and also racing their cars round the circuits they had created.

Woodwork

For numeracy week in woodwork the children created some shape jigsaws, the children chose their shape and painted it in the colour of their choice, then using the saw we cut them in half. The children used self risk assessment during this activity while developing gross and fine motor skills. The children then got the chance to put them back together, using their team work skills and problem solving skills all the children managed to re create the shapes.

Malleable

The children have been using the oats in the malleable area to explore different shapes. The children used the cutters to create different 2D shapes which they were then able to identify.

we used the playdough and different shaped  buttons. We pressed the buttons into the dough to see the shape imprint.

Gross motor area

In the Gross Motor area we have been learning about  circles and semi circles. The children jumped in the hoops developing their gross motor skills, by changing direction while jumping in each hoop. They were also able to count the circles and semi circles in the line.

STEM area

During maths week in the STEM area, we have been exploring force and how it works! Firstly, we done this through making our own paper airplanes! ✈️ We threw them as far as we could and measured what number we got to! For more challenging numbers, we reinforced the concept of 1-1 correspondence for the children to count the number of items beside the written number to still work out how far they threw their plane! They were incredible throughout this! Next, the children made their own rockets and used a straw to blow them as far they could! They started out by drawing their own rocket and designing it themselves. They then cut out the rocket and attached a small pocket to the back of it. From there, they put the straw in and blew as hard as they could and watched the rocket soar! 

Outdoors

Outdoors we went on a shape hunt. The children had shape identifiers and had to find the same shape in the garden. We found loads!