Being outside inspired us to start our garden clear up. We end up with a lot of leaves during autumn, so we used brooms, rakes and wheel barrows to start to clear the leaves – this led to lots of lovely teamwork! Unfortunately, when leaves are in a huge pile, it’s just too tempting not to kick and throw them! So, despite our efforts, the garden is still awash with leaves – but at least we can try again another day!
It might not quite be beach weather just yet, but this week we still explored a beach theme! We set up a tuff tray of seaweed, sand, water and shells. The seaweed offers a really unusual texture and, together with the sand, water and shells, there was plenty of investigation and exploration. Children enjoyed adding animals, and transporting the water between trays. We also investigated what was in the seaweed bubbles as one child noted they couldn’t pop them! We used scissors to cut the seaweed, which was certainly a different use of cutting skills.
With the interest in water from our beach theme, we decided to extend this further. We set up a tuff tray with beakers of coloured water, measuring jugs and giant pipettes. The children spent a lot of time transporting the water between different beakers and jugs, before then adding their own items; paint trays, baking trays and empty bottles from the junk modelling supplies. They pretended to make soup and cupcakes amongst other ideas, demonstrating some lovely independent thinking.
Also popular this week; colour mixing, especially looking at making things ‘lighter’ using white paint, mask making and making, decorating and flying paper aeroplanes.
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
With the half term holiday next week, why not explore some of the ideas on our website for fun play ideas?
http://www.squirrelspreschool.com/fun-activities.html