This week we have continued to focus on our 'all-about-me' topic.  We shared a story about differences, which led to a carpet-time discussion about our own families; who we live with, our brothers and sisters, and our pets.  Our children have also continued to share their family photos and paint their own portraits.  

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.

We are currently focusing on an 'all about me' topic, exploring who we are and what makes us unique.  Many of the children brought in family photographs and have spoken about these during carpet-time.  We have also been looking at ourselves in the mirror and attempting to paint self-portraits; focusing on our hair colour, eye colour and skin colour.  Whilst painting our mouths, many children painted large smiling mouths - this led us to consider our emotions and talk about things that might make us happy, sad or scared.  We've also incorporated maths into this topic by completing a tally chart illustrating the number of pets we all have at home - considering the highest and lowest number and introducing language such as 'more' and 'less'.

Building has been a popular activity this week.  Indoors, many children were building towers using the wooden bricks.  We are now observing how children can work together on these tasks, taking turns to add bricks and developing ideas as to what their structures are, or could be used for.  Outside, the building continued, this time using the giant Duplo blocks as children tried to build themselves!  Blocks offer a wonderful opportunity to encourage maths; counting how many blocks high a structure is, or exploring concepts such as 'tallest' and 'shortest'.

We introduced children to our rhythm sticks this week; we used the sticks to create a beat whilst singing.  The children then chose to extend this as they explored what sounds they could create with the sticks hitting them against trees, the summer house, the grass, plastic crates and anything else they could find! A very noisy, but exciting way to explore sound!

We played a game of Silly Soup during carpet time this week; a game that introduces children to a given sound.  Our focus sound was 'D' - children had to decide whether various items began with a 'D' sound, and could therefore be stirred into our soup, or whether they began with a  different sound and should be returned to the kitchen.  Once we'd made our soup, children then went on a sound search; trying to find items from around the room that began with our focus sound.  We had some great ideas, including a dinosaur, doll and even a dung-beetle!  

Jolly Jo this week focused on moving skills.  Children initially weaved in and out of cones, then we moved on to moving like different animals.  Children moved like snakes, lions, monkeys and dinosaurs!

Other popular activities this week have included searching for bugs (inspired by a large spider on the playhouse!) Making kites (inspired by a Mr Men story). Painting onto clingfilm and foil in the garden, and drawing around ourselves and decorating people pictures,

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

We've been talking about ourselves this week, so why not continue this at home?  Talk with your child about activities they enjoy, friends they have and what makes them happy.

This week we have explored Chinese New Year. 

At the craft table we made our own Chinese inspired lanterns, practicing our scissor skills to make cuts into card.  We also made a large dragon's head as a collaborative craft project; we used paint, glue, tissue paper and string to create our large-scale dragon!  We then used our finished dragon's head whilst performing a dragon dance!  

Children were introduced to Chinese numerals; noticing how these differ from our own and using tracing paper to try and recreate them.  This provided a good opportunity for some of our older children to practice their fine motor skills.  For our younger children we used rice in a tuff tray to encourage mark making on a larger scale; we used our fingers, paint brushes and chopsticks to create patterns.  We then added spoons, scoops and jugs to satisfy our transporting schemas.

Our shop was made into a Chinese restaurant, complete with menus and recipe books to inspire meal ideas.  We observed lots of lovely role play in this area, with children 'writing' their food orders and then cooking for their friends.  

Many of our children enjoy playing the 'lava game' - this is a game of their own making where when someone says the floor is lava, everyone then has to find something to stand on!  To extend this, we decided to perform a science experiment, combining vinegar and baking powder and making our own lava!  With Chinese New Year in mind, we decided to make the lava erupt from a dragon instead of a volcano!  This created a wonderful sense of awe as the children quickly crowded around the dragon to watch as the bubbling mixture bubbled up and exploded from the dragon's mouth!

Our dolls house has been popular all week, with children playing with this in small groups.  We've observed how, as friendships grow and children's confidence increases, children are really beginning to extend their play and build up their imaginative play ideas.
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Other popular activities this week have included building with stickle bricks, jigsaw puzzles and sharing stories.

Ideas to continue the learning at home:

Our children loved our science experiment with erupting lava this week!  Why not try some new activities at home too - we have lots of ideas on our website - just follow the link below...

http://www.squirrelspreschool.com/fun-activities.html