The week started with some of our children continuing to show an interest in frogs.  With this in mind, we tried to create our own pond!  We used a jelly product called ‘Gelly-baff’ to represent the frogspawn, the children drew and cut out their own tadpoles from black card, and we used plastic frogs, we even made large lily-pads from tissue paper!  The finished product was more muddy swamp than pond – but we had plenty of fun making it and observed lots of lovely team-work!
 
The pond idea seemed to inspire lots of requests for water play over the week.  On Wednesday we enjoyed bathing the baby dolls using water, sponges and soap.  The sponges sparked lots of interest as children realised they could soak up the water and squeeze it out elsewhere.  To extend this, we set up a tuff tray with water, sponges, pipettes, bowls and spoons to enable us to explore lots of different ways to transport water.  We then coloured the water to add colour mixing into our exploration.
 
Sensory play has been popular all week.  The children enjoyed playing with rainbow rice; scooping, pouring and mixing it.  We’ve also played with pasta; scooping and pouring it, then using it in the kitchen corner, and then using it in craft on Friday.  We also enjoyed playdough, with the children helping us make this on Monday morning.
 
Role play has been a popular activity all week.  Our children are now much more able to develop their own role-play ideas and to build up these ideas with peers.  Many of the girls decided to be princesses and used various dressing up outfits and material to dress the part, they then awaited their princes!  The boys have been more into dinosaur and superhero play; using our new superhero capes as they showed off their super powers in the garden!
 
The warmer weather has ensured our seedlings have been growing fast, so, on Friday, we planted these out in the garden.  We discussed what seedlings need to grow, and observed all the different seedlings we have (tomato, sweetcorn, bean and pumpkin).  We are looking forward to being able to watch these continue to grow and to produce food for snack!
 
Finally, with the warmer weather, we’ve enjoyed plenty of garden games.  We’ve been doing running races, sticky toffee, football, egg and spoon racing, duck duck goose, and what’s the time Mr Wolf.
 
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:  Could you explore growing at home?  Maybe you could plant tomato seeds in a Grobag or, if space is limited, old milk bottles can be turned into herb planters for the windowsill.  Children love to watch as plants grow, and can learn to look after them and water them daily.

This week we have explored different ways to mix colours.  On Monday the children used zip-lock bags to mix paint – spooning in a range of colours, fastening the bag, and then using their hands to mix the paint.  This added a sensory aspect to colour mixing which a number of the children really enjoyed. We also looked at mixing colours using shaving foam!  Children were offered a range of paint powders, spoons and brushes alongside a tuff tray filled with shaving foam – they were then encouraged to explore!  The shaving foam offered a great base for the powder, making very thick and gloopy paint!
 
With some warmer weather this week, we’ve also been enjoying the garden.  The children were inspired to go bug hunting on Wednesday, a theme that they then revisited independently on Friday. Using bug pots, the children dug through soil, checked under pots, and raked through the leaf litter to find bugs! We found a collection of worms, woodlice and even a snail! Having examined our finds, with many children having-a-go at drawing their finds, we decided to wake up Sammy, our resident African land snail.  Sammy often hibernates, so we discussed what ‘hibernation’ means before cleaning out his tank and giving him his first feed of the year.
 
As well as bugs, we’ve also looked at the lifecycle of frogs!  On Friday, our craft session considered the lifecycle of frogspawn-tadpole-frog!  We used a range of material to represent these stages, and then shared a fact book that showed this in more detail.  Many of the children then shared their experiences of pond dipping, finding frogs, and having ponds in their gardens.  We will continue to explore lifecycles as we go forward into spring.
 
With the start of spring this week, the seeds we recently planted have now germinated.  A small group of children helped to pot up these seedlings, ready to go out in the garden next week.
 
Finally, we were very lucky on Thursday to have a visit from ‘Sounds Right’ a pre-school phonics program that introduces sounds and how these sounds can be blended to form words.  Our children were all very eager to join in with a variety of phonics games.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:  Why not take a trip to the country park where pond dipping is available free of charge in their dipping pond; a simple net and bucket is all you need to get started.  You can find a range of pond life, including tadpoles, to explore.

With both Comic Relief and British Science Week, we’ve had a busy week!  The children have enjoyed baking cakes each day, with some of the children enjoying a trip to Tesco to help buy cake supplies!  These have been sold at the end of each day, with all proceeds going to comic relief.
 
We’ve also been enjoying science this week.  We explored tunnels and how to construct these using a range of materials; sand, stones and sticks.  This then led to making tunnels in the garden using our crates and wooden planks.
 
We also explored reflective materials.  Children used a range of material and then used a torch to see what happened when the light was shone on to it.  This led to some lovely descriptive language such as, shiny, glittery and bright.  The torches themselves were very popular, with children enjoying watching the torchlight moving around the walls and ceiling.
 
Dinosaurs were popular on Thursday.  We set up a tuff tray with a dinosaur landscape and encouraged children to create their own dinosaurs in clay!  The children looked at various adaptations that dinosaurs had, such as spikes, horns and wings!
 
On Friday, we used ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ as our basis for craft.  The children explored a range of fruits that the caterpillar ate, and used these to paint with.  They also simply enjoyed exploring the fruit, squeezing them, cutting them open and scooping out seeds.  With seeds in mind, we also decided to start planting, ready for spring and summer.  We selected a range of vegetable seeds and have now planted these in a propagator.  We’ll be carefully watching these as they germinate and start to grow.
 
Other popular activities have included the balancing crates and wooden planks, the sand pit, making dens in the summer house and the mud kitchen.  Despite the rain and wind, many of our children still favour taking their learning outside!
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home: British Science week aims to celebrate the fun of science, with an emphasis on learning through play!  Why not take a look at their website for fun ideas you could try at home?  We’d love to hear about any experiments you try…
 
https://www.britishscienceweek.org/ 

This week we have been celebrating World Book Day and have been focusing on storytelling during carpet time and key-group time.  Children have been sharing their favourite stories from home, which have included; ‘Penguin’, ‘Zog’ and ‘The Gruffalo’.
 
To link in with this, we have had a book theme at the craft table each day.  On Monday we made our own ‘Supertato’ super heroes!  Children collected items from the craft trolley and designed their own potato!  In the afternoon we then explored the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, decorating characters from the book.
 
On Tuesday we explored the story of Aliens Love Underpants!  We decorated pants using a collection of pencils, paints and stickers; we then made alien pictures by blowing paint with straws!  Next we decided to make our own alien using papier-mâché – we made glue using flour and water, and then used this to stick newspaper to a balloon.  We revisited this task the next day to add more layers and to paint our alien!
 
On Wednesday our focus story was Oi Frog – we used the craft table to jump frogs from their paint covered lily-pads into the pond!  We also played a game where we pretended to be frogs jumping from our lily-pads into the water!
 
On Thursday we decided to tell our own stories at the craft table.  We had a collection of book characters, and used these to tell a story.
 
Finally, on Friday, we re-visited one of our favourite stories, ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ by making our own ‘story maps’.  We used a collection of materials to illustrate each part of our bear hunt, and then encouraged children to use their story maps to retell the story to others.  This is a great way to encourage children to remember stories they have read and to talk about the story in more depth.
 
In addition to our story focus, we also celebrated Pancake Day on Tuesday and had a go at making and flipping our own pancakes! 

​We’ve also started to develop adult-led ideas that incorporate a forest school ethos.  This week a small group of children used large darning needles to thread bread and raisins to make bird feeders.  This task helped focus on fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.  We also extended it and talked about the patterns we could make, e.g. bread-raisin-bread or bread-bread-raisin-bread-bread-raisin, helping to incorporate maths concepts.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:  Use your World Book Day token to buy a new book and enjoy sharing this with your child – can they join in with the story at all? Or maybe they can come up with their own story ideas? Let us know what book you chose!

The sunshine to start the week helped us turn our thoughts to spring.  We had planted some seeds before half term, and we were excited to find that these had started to grow!  This led to us finding our watering cans and getting to work watering the whole garden! With the interest in water, we also filled a tuff tray with water and added our sea animals – these were soon joined by the dinosaurs (who seem to get everywhere!), as well as cars!
 
The sun also inspired our craft table, on Monday we made mosaic themed sun catchers using sticky back plastic.  It was very tricky, with the plastic sticking to everything, but this in itself led to an interesting conversation about the sticky texture, as well as talking about colours and light.
 
Magnets were popular this week.  A child’s interest in magnets led to us setting up a tuff tray of various items to explore; spoons, baking trays, magnetic trains, magnetix building blocks, and a metal tin.  The children then took their exploration outside and found their own items; including the shed and watering can.   This shows how we plan; we observe children’s interests (magnets) – we then plan activities based on this (an exploration tuff tray) – we then enable children to lead their own learning, explore their own ideas and learn through play!
 
Fairy tales have been popular this week.  Our ginger scented playdough led to us reading the story of the ginger bread man.  We also enjoyed the story of Jack and the beanstalk on Friday – this inspired us to then have-a-go at making our own beanstalk!  With World Book Day on the 7th March, we will extend these ideas further next week.
 
We explored an activity called ‘ Tap Tap Art’ this week.  This is an activity where children use small hammers to secure shapes into cork with small tacks.  This is a great way to develop fine-motor skills, hand-eye coordination and to discuss colours and shapes. Some children simply made an array of shapes, other had their own ideas to make pictures from the shapes, and some even carefully copied the pattern of shapes from the box.
 
Marble Run was particularly popular this week.  After being forced indoors by the rain on Thursday, we all came together on the carpet to build marble runs.  Children worked together and demonstrated some lovely turn taking ideas.
 
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:  Looking forward to World Book Day – why not share a favourite story.  Look at the pictures, talk about the characters, encourage children to join in with repeated refrains and simply enjoy books!