Oakburn Early years centre

This week at the expressive area , we have been making musical 🎶 shakers, the boys and girls have helped to decorate the shakers that we will use for tidy up time.

The boys and girls wanted to make their own shakers to take home , we explored the different

textures of the rice 🍚 and pasta that we used to put into our bottles . We added paint to make beautiful coloured🌈shakers and finally decorated the bottles. We spoke about our favourite songs to sing at home 🏠, well done 👏 everyone who made a shaker this was fabulous .

In the water tray this week we have added some jungle animals 🦧🐊🐅the boys and girls loved exploring them, talking about what each animal sounds like . The most favourite thing in the water tray this week was the babies 👶the boys and girls fully embraced the role in washing there babies and making sure that they were sparkling clean 🧼 .

In the garden, we had bubbles which then sparked the interest of the bubble trouble book, we read and spoke about the book and a child said “ we have green bubbles too”. We then spoke about the size of the bubbles that we had small, medium and large and then the children were running around the garden trying to catch the bubbles. The children then were trying to use the bubbles themselves and let their friends catch them.

Following the interest from the bubbles, the children have been interested in washing the dirty cars with water and making their own bubbles with fairy liquid. We have being using various materials such as sponges, buckets, fairy liquid and coloured paint. We have been mixing the paint in the after to make it a foam coloured car wash also adding lots of fairy liquid to make it very soapy and bubbly. We were also transporting the water from the wheelbarrow to tuff tray adding in boats and also different cars. As we were choosing the cars and the boats we were speaking about the different colours that we had and the size of the cars and boats.

After using our tuff tray from the garden washing dirty toy cars and boats in the garden, the children wanted a real life experience of washing a real car, so then we had our very own Oakburn Carwash! The children had their own individual bucket and sponge filled with car soap, they had a great time, washing the dirty car. As we were out the front our our nursery the children had to risk asses the area and think about

How we could keep ourselves safe? What the dangers were.?  What we needed?

To keep safe the children said – Use our listen ears and looking eyes and be careful strangers could be there.

They said the dangers were- Making sure we only stay beside the car we are washing and don’t go on or near the road and stay with the grown ups.

The children said we need- sponges, soapy water, hi-vis vest, goggles and buckets.

Our little Acorns, have been very active and curious this week.

The children chose to engage in our “We are going on a bear hunt” book where they showed an interest in pointing at the bears body parts. We followed their interest and provided mirrors and an experience of point to your… This supported our little Acorns as they began to learn their body parts. We followed this on with a painting experience, the children were keen to paint there hands and feet. P.M- “paint nonies hands”.

We then supported their numeracy skills, creating spiders with peg legs.  The children counted their legs O.M- “1,2,3,4,5”.

One of our little Acorns was wearing a top that had mini beasts on it, they showed an interest in looking at their top and naming the bugs. We then got out a bug game, we caught the little bugs, developing their fine motor skills and naming them , promoting language.

Our little Acorns have been beginning to develop early friendships with their peers as they explore what our centre has to offer them. A child pointed at their friends and their Early Years Worker (EYW) named them.  With this we created photos of all the peers to support the children learn each other’s names.

We have created a self registration with this to allow the children to strive to develop their self help skills/independence.

Our little Acorn room have had a very busy week. A few children showed an interest in our mud kitchen. A.M said “making cakes”. So we provided some wooden cakes to allow the children to begin to participate in role play.
OM.R told her Early Years Workers (EYW’S) “mummy loves cake”, this sparked our baking experience. The children have been showing enjoyment in group time, with lots of giggles as they followed the actions to familiar nursery rhymes. This has allowed the children to begin to develop early friendships. C.M asked for the fish game and some children chose to develop their fine motor skills, as they caught the fish. G.M has been showing an interest in our water tray so we have been setting up inviting provocations to allow our little learners to develop their curiosity and explore through their senses.

In the discovery area the children were interested in the puppets and story spoons this week. We matched them to the book, “room on the broom” and “Three little pigs”.

Carrying on from last week’s discussions around colours and numbers, we used the farm animals to print footprints in different colours and compare the sizes.

This week in the expressive area we have been exploring castles! The children used the junk modelling to build their own castles after looking at some photos of castles online.
They developed their fine motor skills through cutting and sticking, and developed their creativity when designing the castle. We then made our own stained glass windows to go on the castle.🏰

This week the children were interested in tasting new things and disucussing different smells. This sparked the interest in the malleable area of hosting a tea party like the tea set in our house corner. We had variety of different flavours of tea to try such as cinnamon, ginger and peppermint.
All of the resources where displayed on the tough tray for the children to make the tea independently to try. The children found the ginger flavour to be spicy!! 

The tea party activity sparked interest in cakes and baking. We made some cakes using a recipe, taking turns of measuring and mixing to make our cake mix. Once cooked we got to take some home. The children had lots of fun during this activity and I will continue to offer different baking and tasting activities next week!

This week in the village area we have been talking about the community. We discussed all the different buildings surrounding Milngavie. Staff took some of the children on an outing to milingavie village in which we were able to explore what we previously discussed. We took the children to the local Tesco in which they helped us chose what they would like for snack! The children had lots of fun and were super excited to tell the other children what they done on their outing!

In the Courtyard we have had some tasters of different fruit and vegetables at the courtyard kitchen. Some were sweet and some were sour 🍋. When trying the different fruits we looked in the mirror to see which one made us make funny faces. 

Some science experiments were also going on in the courtyard using some  skittles and water. First we linked the skittles together on a plate then added some water to create a marble effect with the colours.