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.