On Tuesday, we extended children's recent interest in sounds and played a listening game at carpet-time. Children had to listen to an instrument being played out of sight, and then guess what was being played; choosing from a selection of different instruments. This offers a great opportunity to explore sounds, whilst also encouraging good listening skills.
Colour mixing has been popular this week. Children initially started with small pallets of pre-mixed paint and explored what happened as they mixed these. On Friday, children had-a-go on their own; selecting the coloured powders, adding these to a tuff tray and mixing with water. It ended up being a great learning opportunity (albeit messy) both exploring colour and how the powder and water change to create the paint and how the consistency of this changes as more water or powder is added.
With valentines day on Friday, we decided to explore this with a pre-school twist! We froze flower petals in ice and discovered the best ways to melt the ice and free the flowers! Children decided that taking the ice outside into the sun was the best way to melt it! We also made red sparkly playdough; adding plenty of glitter! We explored this using our heart shaped cutters. We decided to make love potions in our tuff tray - adding flower petals and coloured water into our potion bottles! Finally, some of the children chose to make cards for people they love - sticking hearts and sparkle onto their cards.
Jolly Jo this week focused on balance and hand-eye coordination. We started by carrying cups on a tray, weaving in and out of cones. Then we had egg and spoon races, trying not to drop our eggs!
Finally, we've been exploring our children's Kindle this week. Our Kindle has a number of Apps that enable children to explore different skills. This week we focused on a number recognition game - where children were encouraged to identify a given number, and use their finger to then draw this number - this targets maths, technology and physical skills.
Other popular activities this week have included construction vehicles with both water and rice, fairy small world, and balancing in the garden.
Ideas to continue the learning at home:
Our listening game offered a great opportunity to simply listen to sounds and identify what they were. You can replicate this at home or on a walk. Make sounds out of sight and guess what's making the sound, or listen to sounds on a walk (e.g. cars, birds etc.) and identify what the sound is.