This week our thoughts have turned to Easter!  We have had a range of Easter themed templates available at the craft and drawing table and have been busy making our own Easter cards to take home.  We finished the week by baking Easter nests to take home.  The children helped to shred shredded wheat and stir this into melted chocolate, before then helping to scoop this into cupcake cases to make a ‘nest’.  We had eggs and chicks to add, although the children seemed to find it more fun to play with the chicks, transferring them between pots!  This activity enabled children to talk about measuring and numbers, it also led to children talking about the chicks and the chicks’ Mummies and how they thought the chicks might feel!
 
Rolling and ramps have been a popular theme this week.  We started the week by having our drain pipe ramps inside, with cars available to roll down the ramps.  The children then started to find their own items to roll, such as dolls, balls and plastic animals!  The rolling action then moved outside – we had our climbing frame up in the garden and the children found various items to roll down the slide!  It’s wonderful to watch the children discover their own ideas and lead their own play; coming up with ideas for things to roll, and trying to ‘guess’ which might be fastest or slowest down the ramp.  It also enabled children to learn that some things roll (the balls and the wheeled cars), but others got stuck (the plastic animals and little people!)
 
Our craft area was popular on Friday – we used a new technique of ‘paint splatting!’  Blobs of paint were ‘hidden’ beneath cotton wool pads, the children then had to ‘splat’ the pad using our ‘splatters’, which created some amazing blobs!  They then extended this and used the cotton wool pads for mark making and incorporated colour mixing into their play.  It was very active art, with lots of big arm movements needed to get a good splat!  This seemed to help encourage some of our more reluctant artists to come and have a go!
 
We explored a new sensory material on Wednesday by creating ‘cloud dough’ – this is a mix of cornflour and hair conditioner.  It smelt wonderful, and was a little like playdough, but was much silkier to touch – leading to children using some lovely descriptive language, “it’s gooey,” “it’s like playdough,” “it’s like spider webs,” and “it’s like slime!”  With textures in mind, we set up a texture ‘touch table’ on Thursday and enabled children to touch, feel and describe a range of textures.  A favourite texture was the fake fur which one child said was, ‘fluffy like a monster!’ Whilst another child then used this to make a bear!
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
Textures have been popular this week, so why not search your home and talk about the different textures you can find; fluffy rugs, hard floors, shiny tables, or rough bricks? See if your child can describe how something feels, as well as introducing them to new descriptive words… if they say something is soft, you could possibly suggest squashy, furry, fuzzy etc.

This week is ‘British Science Week’ – so we have been celebrating all things science! On Monday we had fun with physics and introduced the concept of floating and sinking.  Children worked in small groups as we first tried to ‘predict’ whether an item would float or sink – we then investigated what actually happened!  We found the majority of our items actually floated, so we began to actively search for things that might sink!  On Wednesday we investigated chemistry by exploding a volcano by combining vinegar and baking powder!  The children helped as we added the ingredients and then observed as the ingredients reacted and caused the ‘lava’ to flow!  We then extended the fun by marching dinosaurs through the lava flow and across what looked like a prehistoric swamp!  On Friday our focus was biology and we enjoyed planting cress seeds – the children helped to scatter the seeds and then used a watering can to help give the seeds a drink!  We look forward to following this up next week and watching our cress grow.
 
We’ve also enjoyed cooking again this week and made our own vegetable soup!  The children were involved with peeling and chopping the carrots, potatoes, parsnips and onion, before then helping to stir the ingredients.  Once cooked, we then all enjoyed this for snack.  We always ask the children for their ideas for activities and, when asked what we should cook next, the children suggested cakes!  So next week we’ll enjoy baking some Easter themed cakes.
 
With the weather finally feeling warmer this week, we’ve enjoyed plenty of time in the garden.  The tools have been popular, so we decided to change our ‘Lego den’ into a ‘tool shed.’  We moved our tool bench into the playhouse and added hard hats, high vis jackets, and plenty of tools.  The children have then used this as a basis for plenty of builder based role play; ‘sawing’ the trees, ‘fixing’ the shed, and ‘hammering’ the fences.
 
Animals have also been very popular.  We have enjoyed creating animal themed Duplo, as well as playing with the plastic animals, the dinosaurs, and investigating the giant plastic bugs with our magnifying glasses.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
We’ve really enjoyed exploring science this week, so why not carry on exploring this at home too - we have some science ideas on our website that you could try at home…
 
http://www.squirrelspreschool.com/uploads/1/8/4/4/18444885/science_experiments.pdf
 

After the excitement of the snow last week, we decided to use a range of white paint, foil and glitter to make our own snow inspired pictures! We found that using forks and cotton wool buds gave some beautiful ‘snowy’ effects on our paper, before then exploring other resources from our craft cupboard and coming up with new ideas!
 
We’ve also been focusing on Mothers’ Day this week – children have been invited to make a card either for Mum or another special person in their lives (some insisted on making cards for Dads and Grandparents too)… this has offered a lovely opportunity to talk about special people in our lives and about how we can say thank you for all that they do.
 
Over the last few weeks we’ve been focusing on fine motor skills through various threading activities.  We tried lacing cards, but many found this tricky.  So we simplified the task and tried threading pasta instead, which the children really enjoyed.  This week, to practice this skill in a different way, we’ve been using cotton reels to thread – which, again, has proved very popular.  It’s important for our children that we find different ways to focus on the same skill to enable them to practice and become secure in a skill.
 
Following our visit from Phonics Stars last week, we’ve been using some of these ideas during circle time to help us focus on sounds.  This week we played ‘silly soup’ – trying to identify items beginning with an ‘S’ sound to go into our soup.  Being aware of sounds is an important first step, helping children to be ready for when they are taught phonics during their reception year at school.
 
We had planned some colour based craft last week in readiness for the Hindu festival of Holi.  Unfortunately the snow had other ideas!  So we explored it this week instead!  We searched for a range of different colours and textures on or craft trolley and used these to decorate one of our favourite book characters, Elmer.  We also enjoyed sharing an Elmer book, exploring lots of colours such as the setting red sun and the lush green jungle!  It is an important aspect of early years to ensure children explore a range of faiths and festivals; helping them to develop an understanding of the diverse community in which we live.  We would always welcome our families to join us to share any festivals they celebrate.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
Could you explore threading at home too?  Maybe you could thread penne pasta onto strands of spaghetti?  Or maybe you could use larger resources and thread toilet roll tubes?  These activities will help to develop both fine motor skills, as well as hand-eye coordination.

Well what a snowy week!  We braved the snow as much as we could… we went out for short bursts and enjoyed running about in the snow, looking at the tracks we’d made, throwing snowballs at the wall, and making a snowman!  We also took the snow indoors… we filled a tray with snow, added powder paint, spoons, and paint brushes - then simply let the children explore!  The children mixed the powder in with the snow and watched as the snow turned it into wet paint, the colours then mixed as we continued to stir and mash the snow!  As the snow melted, the paints became more and more watery – so we explored using this to then paint onto paper!  When the snow had all melted, we then found some ice cubes in the freezer to continue our exploration!  This gave us the idea to try and freeze our own creations – so we used different coloured water and lots of glitter and left these to freeze overnight… the next day this gave us even more ice to explore!
 
Monday morning the children found Goldilocks and the 3 bears were having their porridge in our kitchen area!  This helped set the scene for a story focused week in readiness for World Book Day.  We acted out ‘Goldilocks and the 3 Bears’, we used our story puppets to retell the story of the ‘Gruffalo’s Child’, we shared ‘Owl Babies’, ‘Handa’s Surprise’ and ‘Super-tato’, and then used a cardboard box to make our own rocket so that we could fly to the moon like the bear in ‘Whatever Next?’  One child asked for our shop to come out this week, so we decided to transform this into a book shop!  To give our children somewhere to read the books they’d ‘bought’ we set up a cosy corner full of cushions and beanbags too!
 
On Monday we hosted a ‘Phonics Stars’ session; this is a fun, very active session, where children begin to acquire phonological awareness and link this to letter recognition through a series of different games, songs and stories.  One of the children’s favourite games was silly soup where we had to collect all the ‘S’ sound items to go into our silly soup!  We also had fun with our ‘dough disco’ where we had to move to music squishing and squashing our playdough as we went!    The feedback from children was overwhelmingly good, so we plan to invite Phonics Stars back again next term.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
With World Book Day this week, why not share favourite stories with your little one?  Reading and re-reading the same story will help children become familiar with a story - they may start to join in with repetitive text or be able to tell you what might happen next.  You could even offer props to help act stories out, enabling children to explore storytelling in a more interactive way.