Investigation Hub and Discovery Hub at Deckham
Characteristics of effective learning – Playing and exploring
This week the children have thoroughly enjoyed playing in our new walk-in sand area!
Through their play they have displayed creativity in their ideas, for example, pretending to be mermaids with shells decorating their tails. They have explored cause and effect as they experiment with whether the sand will move through the funnels when it is dry and wet. They have developed their understanding of capacity and volume as they fill, empty, transport and transfer sand between containers of different sizes and shapes. Being able to sit in the sand is also a wonderful sensory experience for the children.
This week is National Storytelling Week. We have shared stories together during group times and play. The Investigation Hub children listened to the poem ‘Earthworms’ and then used playdough and other materials to try to create their own minibeast story characters. Some of the characters included a queen spider who sat on a throne and liked to jump on trampolines, a king spider who lived in an oven, a ladybird who lived in a book and ate cupcakes all day, and two worms called Star and Spotty. What brilliantly imaginative ideas!
They also listened to and learned the rhythmic pattern wriggle-wriggle-dig, wriggle-dig-dig-wriggle in the poem, which described how the worm moved. They then experimented with moving like different minibeasts and we created new rhythmic word patterns to describe these movements, for example, for a ladybird we created the pattern tiptoe-tiptoe-fly-fly-fly etc.
At the end of this post we have included some photos of ideas for storytelling from the National Literacy Trust that you might like to enjoy at home. If your child has a favourite story or if you enjoy making up a story together with them using one of the activity ideas, please add an observation of this to Famly as we love to share in children’s enjoyment of stories and books.
In the sensory room this week, the children have been exploring the different textured mats as they took turns to travel across them and used words including “bumpy”, “spiky” and “soft” to describe the textures.
After learning the names of animals and the sounds that they make over the past few weeks, the Discovery Hub children have enjoyed watching footage of real animals at Edinburgh Zoo this week. They have named the animals and talked about what they have observed them doing.
Outdoor learning
We enjoy outdoor play in all different kinds of weather, and this week the children put on waterproof clothing and had lots of enjoyable play splashing in the puddles that were created from all of the recent rainfall!
Investigation Hub story of the week: The Little Red Hen
Discovery Hub story of the week: Where’s Spot?
Song of the week: Two Little Dickie Birds
Sign of the week: Play / Tidy
Parents as Partners
On Saturday 7th February at the Glasshouse in Gateshead, the National Literacy Trust are having a free event for families.
The fun, free event will take place between 11am and 1pm and will involve making a musical rain-maker and using it to participate in an interactive story-telling session.
No booking required, you can just show up on the day.
Please see the link below for more details:
https://theglasshouseicm.org/whats-on/storytelling-sessions-national-literacy-trust
We hope you have a lovely weekend.