Despite the weather not being particularly wintery yet, we decided to create our own polar landscape by adding ice and polar animals to one of our tuff trays. This proved very popular, with the ice sparking conversations about how it ‘melts’ and ‘turns into water’. Once the ice had melted, we used the water jug to refill our ice cube tray, ready to freeze more for the following day. As the week progressed, so did the ideas of what to do with the ice! By Wednesday, our icy polar landscape was being chiselled and hammered as the children experimented with how to ‘smash’ the ice!’
The playdough has also been given a festive feel with us attempting to make snowmen! Using white ‘snowdough’, twigs and ribbon, we’ve squished and rolled our dough into snowmen, snowdogs and snowballs!
Not everyone was feeling festive though, and an important part of our ethos is that we are child-led and we do follow the children’s ideas. Because of this, we’ve been planting seeds this week! Inspired by the soil in the dinosaur ‘swamp’ – one of our children asked if we could use the soil to plant seeds, so we planted cress and await to see how well it will grow at this time of the year!
We’ve also enjoyed some ‘large art’ this week – not all children are inclined to participate in mark making, so we’ve been experimenting with ways to encourage our reluctant mark makers. By using large rolls of paper beneath the dinosaurs and adding crayons; many of the children were more inclined to have-a-go and add to a collective masterpiece!
Finally, we tried a new phonics game of ‘eye-spy’ on Friday – we used our telescopes to see if we could find items that began with a given sound.
Ideas to continue this week’s fun at home:
We’ve been busy preparing for our nativity – so keep practicing those nativity songs! The words are on our website...