The Den:

We have had a very busy week this week exploring pancake day and investigating wild animals. 

Playing and exploring:

It was pancake day on Tuesday. The children participated in making yellow play-dough to represent pancakes. The children were really excited to help make the dough, showing confidence as they poured and measure ingredients. I encouraged the children to help stir the ingredients with a spoon, which they were able to do- speaking “mix mix”. 

Once the dough was made, the children used rollers to roll the dough. Myself and Holly rolled them into flats shapes to resemble pancakes, some of the children copied making their own ‘pancakes’. 

We then decorated our own ‘pancakes’ out of recycled cardboard cut into circles and paint to represent pancake toppings. I spoke “we have Nutella, strawberries and lemon juice… what would you like?” The children had lots of fun painting their pancakes with their chosen ‘toppings’. After looking at pancakes in a range of ways, the children had the best time eating some for snack! 

Communication and language:

When reading an animal book, I noticed some of the children struggle to link sounds to the animals. This prompted us to create a wild animal tuff tray to help the children learn new animal noises and encourage language development. We added a range of textures and materials to help engage the children further. We created grass out of thick ribbon and water out of shredded tissue paper. We added the animals and the children had lots of fun. As they played, we labelled the animals and made their associated noise. The children copied familiar noises like “roar” for lion and “oo-ah-ah” for monkey. We talked about features of animals like how an elephant has a ‘trunk’ and ‘tusks’. It was great to see the children engaging in this activity and pick up new animal noises. 

On Wednesday during group time, one of the children was really interested in the book “zoom to the moon,” asking for it to be repeated many times. The other children took a liking to this book as well so I read it multiple times and sung the song. To extend this interest, I made a ‘rocket ship’ out of card and the children had so much fun flying it around. They recounted parts of the book from memory speaking “zoom… flying rocket ship… blast off… 1 2 3 4 5!”

Parents as partners:

Just a reminder that half-term week for term time children is next week- Monday 23rd February to Friday 27th February!

The Nest and Den children will be joined together in the Nest for half term with lower numbers throughout the nursery.