2-3 The Discovery Hub
This week the children have enjoyed a picnic with our nursery teddy bears! In our talking tub at the beginning of the week, we discovered a teddy with a note. The teddy was inviting us to have our snack as a picnic with the other teddy bears. We helped to prepare the picnic food by carefully using a knife to butter crackers and we also used a small jug to pour our own drinks. We then enjoyed the picnic food with the teddies while listening to the ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ song and sharing the story ‘Whatever Next’. We noticed that the bear in the story was having a picnic with its teddy, just like us!
Characteristics of effective learning – Playing and Exploring
This week the children have explored gloop, using their hands, and other tools. Some children made observations about what the gloop felt like.
“That bit is hard to move.”
“It’s coming off my finger.”
“Sticky!”
The children noticed that when the minibeast toys were placed into and then removed from the gloop they left imprints, just as they had in the playdough last week. The children used spoons, sticks and paintbrush handles to experiment with making marks in the gloop.
Gloop is easy to make and provides so many learning opportunities from early scientific exploration to mark making. If you would like to try making it at home, gloop is made by combining cornflour and a little bit of water. Add the water gradually, until the consistency appears to be stiff and solid when you try to move it in the bowl, but liquid if you let it drip from the spoon. You can also add a tiny bit of food colouring if you would like to experiment with more colourful gloop.
We have had clay available at the studio area this week. As an alternative malleable material to playdough, the clay provides more resistance when the children squeeze, press, roll and flatten it, and therefore adds another level of challenge in strengthening hand muscles and developing fine motor skills. The children combined natural materials with the clay, demonstrating dexterity when pressing the items into the clay. They named the items they were using and some children began to use them to represent something else, for example, a pinecone became the head of a clay dinosaur!
Thank you to Fay for a lovely half term of yoga. This was our final week and it is amazing to observe how familiar and confident the children have become with the songs and yoga movements over time. The bubbles at the end of each session have been met with great excitement every week too!
Outdoor learning
On Tuesday some of the children worked together to join the large polydron shapes in order to construct things of interest to them including a robot and a house. The pieces are challenging to join, and the children worked wonderfully together trying to help each other, and discussing where pieces might be able to join together. Super teamwork!
Story of the week: Whatever Next!
Song of the week: Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear
Makaton sign: Teddy
Parents as Partners
This was the final week of term for our term time only children. We hope you have a wonderful summer holiday and please keep us updated on Famly by letting us know about the experiences you share together over the summer. We love to hear about the children’s special moments outside of nursery.
