One of the children’s favourite stories is, 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears' - the children acted out the story in their own words each day, taking it in turns to play the various roles. The role play area was turned into the Bears' cottage and the children were able to practice mixing oats to make porridge and arranging the three beds, chairs and bowls in preparation for Goldilocks' visit. We learned a new song this week called “When Goldilocks went to the house of the bear”. The song has actions linked to Makaton signing and by the end of the week the children had become very good at remembering the signs as well as the words.
On Wednesday the focus became the story of the Gingerbread man. We read the book in both small and large groups, and the children baked their own gingerbread biscuits. We painted a large gingerbread man for display in our book corner.
The very hungry caterpillar is always a popular book and the children were able to look at the props and to guess which part of the story came next by using these visual prompts.
We went on our very own bear hunt this week. The room was set up to represent the different parts of the story and the children swishy swashed through green material grass, scrunched their feet in the pretend mud and crawled through the deep dark tunnel to find the bear.
As part of our display of the bear hunt story the children had great fun making their own footprints in paint and walking along a large piece of paper. They loved the feel of paint between their toes and enjoyed observing the different sized footprints this created. The children then washed their feet in some warm soapy water (although I'm sure some parents were surprised by the remains of green between toes at bath-time!)
It was Pancake Day on Tuesday and the children helped us to mix batter so that we could make our own pancakes which they had for snack with lemon and sugar. The children were each able to flip their own pancake in a frying pan. This proved to be an excellent way to use their hand eye co-ordination to varying degrees of success.
Other activities this week have included – programming the Beebot which is an electronic toy, hurdles in the garden using planks and plant pots, experimenting with vegetable printing and skipping, jumping throwing balls into buckets with Jolly Jo.
New words we learned this week:
Lumpy
Scrunch