Week beginning 3rd February 2025
Child’s Mental Health week - Know yourself Grow yourself.
This week we joined in Child’s mental health week which had the theme Know yourself, Grown yourself.
The aim is to empower children to embrace self awareness and explore what it means to be them so that they can build resilience and grow and develop.
Many 2,3 and 4 year olds often struggle to verbalise how they feel and their emotions, what they like and also what makes them unique so this is a great theme to introduce to children and ours at Community Playgroup definitely explored it with gusto.
We spent time drawing and creating visions of ourselves in various media and materials, we introduced the emotion monsters who helped us link colours to our emotions and think about what each emotion feels like.
We looked at what are our favourite toys, stories and activities are and had a go at being different characters using our dress up clothes.
We also looked at some coping methods when our emotions overwhelm us from finger tracing, deep breathing, calming bottles and also some homemade sensory fidget balls to help when we feel anxious.
It’s amazing when you see children put into practice what you’ve learnt and explored together either by using the calming methods or being able to verbalise how they feel or talk about the colour of their emotion which helps us adults better understand how they are feeling at that moment.
Week beginning 10th February 2025
Number week
We had lots of number fun this week as we spent time looking at numbers 1-10, from recognising numbers, to counting, giving numeral to quantity and subitising we certainly enjoyed our exploration and had so much fun I’m not even sure if the children realised they were learning at all!
We enjoyed decorating numbers, creating number biscuits in our cooking session, explored ice numbers, had a role play shop where we had to pay the correct amount of coins for our shopping and also created some amazing structures with shapes, counting how many of each shape we needed.
Our activities on Friday were love heart themed to tie in with Valentine’s Day, our children also produced some cards full of love for the special people in their lives!
Hope you enjoy looking what we got up to this week and we wish you all a very Happy Half term.
Why not come back and see what we get up to next half term. - Following on from some recent whole team staff training we will be bringing the engineering theme to playgroup in our first week back together😊
Week beginning 24th February 2025
Engineering and STEM at Community Playgroup
“Engineering activities in early years settings help children to develop essential skills like problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity. Engineering activities tap into children’s natural curiosity and encourage them to ask questions, explore ideas and experiment with different solutions”
At Community Playgroup we try to incorporate as many STEM activities as we can into our planning to help children to be naturally curious and explore the world around them, however we noted as a staff team we were all more familiar and comfortable with the science, technology and mathematical concepts and less so with engineering. So with this in mind we recently completed some whole staff training called “Let’s play in a technical and engineering way”
So following the training and bursting with ideas and new found confidence we set about planning for our engineering week. Activities included looking at bicycles, how they work and trying to create our own, creating cup phones and looking at different ways of communicating, building bridges to save the bears from the lava ( our children currently love the floor is lava game) creating with loose parts, planning, constructing and engineering slides, bridges and even whole cities! In our cookery session we had a go at making biscuit cottages, which I can tell you was no mean feat and took immense patience and critical thinking!!
We hope you enjoy seeing what we got up to 😊
