A Child’s Voice - Mental health Week - 5th February 2024
This week at playgroup we have been taking part in Mental health week, this year’s theme is the child’s voice.
We believe it’s important to empower children to be confident to talk about how they feel, their likes and dislikes and also think about how we can be kind and supportive friends.
We looked at how we are feeling and our emotions, the children spent time linking colours to feelings, making their own emotion monsters and also started making special cards for send a friend a card day.
We have thought about making choices and talking about what we like and what we don’t like. We made loose part faces carefully choosing the pieces we wanted to use, made collages of things we like and also made some trail mix, the children could choose which things they wanted in their mix talking about their likes and dislikes.
On Wednesday we explored sharing with lots of fun activities, thinking about how we could share and compromise…..the children will also be sharing special cards they made for send a friend a card day.
On Thursday we spent time thinking about ways to help us feel calm and grounded. A busy day spent painting mindfulness pebbles, creating some calm sensory bottles using coloured glitter and gems and we also practiced some yoga together.
The children have really embraced everything we have learnt and experienced this week and it’s been lovely to listen to them talking about emotions, feelings and choices.
The hope is that the children will bring all they’ve learnt and talked about home so that they can all have their own conversations with their families and encourage that communication.
Celebrating Chinese New year 2024
Every years billions of people around the world celebrate Chinese New year, including families in our local community so we thought it would be a fun experience for the children to look at some aspects of this celebration. This year is the year of the dragon so we looked at some traditional dragon dancing on the ipads, and then made some dragon stick puppets. We explored some customs and traditions like giving money in small red envelopes and also the significance of the colour red. We tried mark making in red sand including trying to copy some numbers and the traditional character for the word dragon. We also tried to recreate the great wall of china using our duplo bricks across the playroom.
Kindness week -Thinking about what it is to be kind
Week beginning 12th february 2024
This week at Playgroup we will be looking at what it is to be kind.
The children will be trying to fill a big heart with kindness, they will be given a small heart to place onto the display each time they do something kind helpful or thoughtful.
Learning to be kind, take turns and show consideration to others is a challenging concept for children to learn and earning a heart gives the children a sense of achievement and pride and hopefully starts them thinking about how they can demonstrate those characteristics
We thought it would be so lovely if we could spread this kindness throughout the village and beyond too so the children made special heart keyrings and we asked all families to think about who they know who demonstrate kindness, being helpful or thoughtful and nominate them to receive a special heart keyring.
We had a great week thinking about everything to do with being kind, helpful and thoughtful. The children have really embraced the topic and are really beginning to think about what they could do to be kind and helpful.
As it’s important to teach our children that kindness isn’t about a single day or even a week, but a thread throughout our lives we have decided that we are going to keep our kindness board and see how many hearts we can all earn throughout the term.
As Valentines day fell in the middle of kindness week we had lots of heart themed activities and we also encompassed the children’s current interests too! What another busy week we shared…… and a fitting end to the half term
Shrove Tuesday 2024
On Shrove Tuesday we had lots of fun making pancakes together. The children are all becoming expert cooks and confidently crack eggs, pour without spilling and label and add ingredients to create the pancake batter. They then had lots of fun tasting the different toppings as we ate the pancakes we made together for snack, and of course it wouldn’t be pancake day without trying to flip some cooled pancakes! There were also lots of other pancake themed activities to enjoy from following pancake orders in the pancake parlour to practicing our cutting skills cutting out pancakes and as usual it wouldn’t be playgroup without some pancake themed messy play.
Week beginning 26th February
We began this week looking at traditional fairy tales as we celebrated National tell a fairy tale day. We looked at Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the beanstalk and the 3 little pigs. We also provided lots of different resources so that the children could create their own fantasy based fairy tales.
The rest of the week was spent exploring lots of our favourite activities from dinosaurs in mud to various role play experiences.
We also began thinking about spring as we’ve noticed the daffodils and crocus beginning to bloom and also buds appearing on the trees around the playhouse.
Linking in with these observations our STEM activity this week was called blooming flowers, the children loved placing the folded flowers into the water and watching them open as the water seeped through the fibres of the paper.
Another busy week together, hope you enjoy seeing what we’ve been getting up to
