☀️Our first week together ☀️
Week beginning 9th September 2024
What an amazing first week together we’ve had!
It’s been lovely welcoming back all of the children and also welcoming the new ones for their very first sessions.
The playhouse has been full of chatter and laughter talking about summer experiences and rekindling relationships and forging new friendships.
This term holds a lot of new beginnings for the children but also for the staff team as our new staff settle into their roles, there is lots of ideas, planning and experiences being discussed and we are all very excited for the year ahead.
This week we’ve been focusing on settling back in, friendships and also beginning to explore the all about me topic. We have talked about our families, making some pebble representations, we made some amazing face collages for our display board, we baked shortbread and made them into some delicious edible faces and also used our maths skills to think about how many of each body part or facial feature we have.
We had fun in the garden playing parachute games and also a great body part dice game.
As with all of our activities the children are encouraged to lead their own explorations, play and learning so some of the activities ended up at completely different end points…..it’s so amazing to watch the children’s imagination and ideas come alive
We hope you enjoy looking at what we’ve been doing this week…… why not come back next week to see what we get up to
Week beginning 16th September 2024
We are all unique
This week we continued to explore the all about me theme and began thinking about what makes us who we are, from what we can do to what we look like. We believe that whilst children are all different and learn and develop at different rates that there should be no limitations to what they can do and achieve so providing them with activities that everyone can access, but also ensuring they provide further challenge and are both open ended and can be led by a child’s thinking means that there is no limitation on learning.
We also explored the 3 little pig story this week and thought about which pig was most successful and why. This story helps to learn about planning and thinking, helping others and sharing like the pigs did when their houses were destroyed by the wolf. there was lots of messy fun with the muddy oobleck, watching the children gingerly touching the oobleck and creating narrative around the pigs splashing in the mud to eventually ending up, up to their elbows in the gloop really exploring how the oobleck is both firm and liquid.
Our cooking activity this week was creating rice cake faces, this activity helps the children develop their knife and spreading skills and they also had to think about which vegetables they enjoy and which best represented facial features…… and we had some pretty amazing creations.
There were also lots of activities to help us develop our gross and fine motor skills, using sticker trails seems very popular this term and lots of opportunities to be creative and make choices like which toppings to put on the playdough pizzas or how to decorate our age number (this also helped us to recognise our numbers too!)
Another busy week at playgroup with lots of amazing learning! Remember to come back next week to see what we get up to
Week beginning 23rd September 2024
Lots of Autumn fun!
This week at playgroup we rounded off our all about me exploration by painting our bodies, we all took photos of our heads and then stuck those photos to paper before trying to paint our bodies…… and let me tell you we have some very imaginative children based on their creations. Our final activity was helping Mr Bones find all of his bones…… unfortunately he’d fallen into the sand tray and lost all of his bones, so the children had to hunt through the sand to find parts of his skeleton before putting him back together, this helped the children to visualise a basic skeleton shape and also develop their observational skills matching the bones to the pictures of Mr Bones.
We continued our exploration of the 3 pigs story creating a display board together, the children crafted each of the little pigs house, from straw and sticks haphazardly placed and then spent time carefully lining up of the bricks of the 3rd little pigs house.
Then the fun of Autumn exploration began, we started off thinking about Harvest and how at this time of year many of the crops are fully grown and ripe for harvest. we looked at apples in our very own apple day, creating apple tree collages using our fine motor skills to place red stickers on the apple trees and we also made some delicious apple and cinnamon muffins in our cooking session.
We looked at the changes on the trees around us, watching the leaves begin to start changing colour and had a go at creating some autumnal trees. We did some leaf tile printing covering the tiles with paint before placing on the leaves and pushing down to create print…..We also had a go at creating leaf shapes in the paint using cotton buds.
Our STEM activity this week focussed on magnets and using the magnetic force to move a paperclip around on a plate through paint to create some lovely colourful autumn leaves.
The children noticed the increase in spiders appearing around the garden and seemed fascinated so to support this interest we had lots of messy fun with a foam spiders web.
Another busy week of play, learning and exploration, hope you enjoy looking at what we’ve been up to. Remember to come back next week
Week Beginning 30th September 2024
Lots more Autumnal fun!
This week we continued our exploration of the Autumn season with lots of messy fun, we focussed on our fine motor skills creating beautiful autumnal trees using pipettes of coloured water, broccoli and conker rolling. We made some amazing bread hedgehogs in our cooking session, weighing, measuring, mixing and kneading the dough before forming the hedgehog shapes and finally snipping the spikes. We also made some blow painting hedgehogs, using straws to blow the paint…. when we use straws to blow and suck it helps develop the muscles in the mouth and tongue which helps us to clearly make some of the back sounds like K and G and lip sounds O.W and OH.
We created autumn collages and patterns and also some wands using leaves we’d found.
This week we also gave all of the children the task of filling a bag with autumnal treasure with their families, we were amazed by some of the wonderful things the children collected and it all went to good use as we incorporated it into lots of the activities this week.
We made a lovely scarecrow to decorate the playhouse, carefully drawing round one of the children before using lots of collage items to create his clothes, the children enjoyed learning and singing “I’m a dingle dangle scarecrow”
As part of our harvest and our community themes we also started our foodbank collection……check back in next week to hear more about that
