This week, with fireworks night looming, we have enjoyed lots of firework inspired craft. The children were shown a range of paint techniques, including; tea bag ‘splats’, toilet roll rockets, and bubbly bonfires! The children have been free to experiment with these techniques and come up with their own creative interpretations… sometimes we may teach a skill, but the end results can be very different! We also enjoyed baking firework themed biscuits and learning a new firework based song!
We also had a chance this week to offer our ‘harvest’ biscuits to the local lunch club. On Wednesday the children visited the lunch group in the main hall of the community centre where they sang some of their favourite songs before then handing out the biscuits. The children did a fantastic job and should all feel very proud of themselves.
Other popular activities this week have included sensory play; alongside our usual sensory materials, such as playdough and mud (in the mud kitchen), we’ve also experimented with rainbow rice and cooked spaghetti! The spaghetti inspired lots of talk about textures (cold, sticky and soft), as well as talking about size and length, with children comparing who had the longest strand! We used our giant tweezers with the spaghetti, helping strengthen fine-motor skills, before children then decided to use these to ‘serve up’ the spaghetti in the home corner for dinner!
Other popular activities have included; Happyland, our hairdresser role-play, lego, and coloured construction bricks.
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
We’ve had fun talking about fireworks this week, so if you see any this weekend, why not talk about all the different colours or sounds you see or hear? Using descriptive language is a great way to introduce new vocabulary; big loud bangs, booms, sparkly or swirling, for example. Alternatively, to help younger children develop language, we often use sound games where we emphasis a beginning sound, such as B B Bang, or W W Weeee – encouraging children to join in.