Week beginning 7th October 2024
Creating with Autumnal treasure and Space exploration
This week at playgroup we continued to explore the changes of the season using the amazing autumnal bounty the children had been collecting, we started the week with some natural weaving using silk, leaves feathers, twigs and pinecones. The children spent time carefully weaving the items through our rattan webs creating some beautiful natural art. We had a go a replicating some of the colours we see at this time of year with foil printing, colouring the foil with felt pen, then spraying a fine mist of water before applying some leaf shapes. The children really seemed to enjoy this activity particularly the water sprays and made some great leaves too.
We used the leaves and other natural items to make models and prints in the playdough and also used our huge pile of conkers to help with our counting, fine motor and engineering skills, it was tricky work balancing the cardboard tubes!!
We also made some autumnal windy day pictures, the children decorated a picture then added some tissue paper and a straw to a window frame poly pocket. They then blew into the straw which created a swirly windy day. Activities like this help support children’s language and communication development as blowing through a straw helps strengthen the mouth and lip muscles needed for clear speech.
Towards the end of the week we joined in World Space Week, lots of our children love the space theme, often making rockets with the construction materials and singing their favourite song “Zoom Zoom Zoom” so following their interests we explored a moon sand tray, created our very own planets, made some paper zooming rockets, looked at shape names and properties when creating some shape rockets, made some rock cakes in our cookery session and also explored the fizzing moon STEM activity. Watching the moon fizz and change colour when we added the vinegar solution was very exciting and encouraged lots of amazing discussions and descriptive language.
Yet another busy week of fun!
Our Harvest Collection and Food Bank Trip
This half term at playgroup we are looking at the changing seasons, harvest, and also thinking about our community as a whole. To join these themes up we thought it would be great to do something to support our local community and to tie in with harvest we have decided to do a collection for our local food bank. Food poverty is a multigenerational issue that can affect anyone, and the statistic show that there has been a 94% increase in food bank usage with more than 1.1 million emergency food parcels provided for children alone between April 2023 and March 2024.
We all had lots of fun delivering our harvest donations to the Foodbank. The children walked so beautifully and listened so well. The lovely ladies at the Foodbank showed the children how the Foodbank works and how they help people.
We were all very excited to spot the dinosaurs in a garden along the high street and get a big wave from the friendly bus driver who passed us.
We finished our morning with some lovely hot chocolate to warm us up.
Week Beginning 14th November 2024
Leaf Art, Recycling and Exploring our interests
This week at playgroup we rounded off our Autumn exploration with some leaf art, making some leaf bowls and wreaths and also doing some leaf threading. Our STEM challenge this week was also leaf themed, we had to work out a way to melt big ice ice blocks and release the leaves trapped inside and then construct our very own leaf man, it was great fun working together to melt the ice.
Using leaves to create something else tied very nicely into the recycling theme as we joined in Recycling week. We feel it’s really important to teach our children how to look after our local environment and do all we can to protect our planet and its natural resources. The theme for this year’s recycling week was “rescue me” saving items from going into the bins. So we repurposed toilet roll tubes into bird feeders used old cartons and pots to make artwork and also looked at sorting our recycling. We also looked at the problem of litter with an oceans tray and used our fine motor skills to pull the orange paper out of the pretend grass.
Following on from this exploration the children had a day of junk modelling where they repurposed an old box making it into a house, they planned what they wanted to do and asked adults to cut a window and a door before decorating the box. Many hours of fun was had with a simple cardboard box house!
As always we also incorporated children interests into the planning so we had an autumn potions tray, a farm set up and also the construction set with diggers and dumpers.
We hope you enjoyed seeing what we got up to this week.
Week beginning 21st October 2024
All things Halloween
As it is our last week together before half term we thought that we would explore all things Halloween this week, the children have been excitedly talking about trips to the pumpkin patch or about costumes, sweets and decorations they have seen in the shops so we thought that to support their interests and discussions we would plan lots of activities centred around this.
We used pumpkins in a variety of ways firstly hammering in golf tees using small wooden hammers then moving onto painting, washing and then finally cutting and carving the pumpkins. We continued the pumpkin theme with puffy paint pumpkins and also some delicious pumpkin biscuits.
We also looked at other things our children associate with halloween from spiders and skeletons and everything else in between which included making some dancing spiders, rescuing bugs from the sticky spider web using tongs and practicing our scissor skills cutting up brightly coloured spaghetti and also making some masks that the children could use on halloween night.
Our STEM activity this week was Magical floating pictures. The children drew spiders onto ceramic plates and tin foil using dry erase markers and then carefully poured water on around the edges of the drawing. Because the dry erase markers are made with alcohol and pigment the ink is less sticky which means it doesn’t stick to the plate, the ink is also less dense than water so it means the drawing will float.
We hope you enjoyed looking at what we got up to this week and maybe you might like to try the magical floating drawings experiment.
