We spent the week exploring dens and shelters. The children had great fun constructing a range of dens and working together as a team.
The waiting is over and the children watched the chick and duckling hatch over Easter. The children were so excited and glued to the action, each egg took around an hour from first crack until the babies to emerge, it was amazing to watch! The experience has encouraged some wonderful development with children extending speech to describe the birth to parents, to wonderful role play of children hatching from eggs, and wonderful drawings of the action. The children are now practicing caring skills by looking after these little birds. I love nature!
We are very excited about the arrival of our eggs. The children have been reading up on the process and understand our eggs don't have a mummy chicken to keep them warm and turn them regularly so we have placed them in our special machine to warm and turn them. We are counting the 21 days down then we will take over as their mummies fir a while before they grow big enough to live out side with the rest of the group.
Making the most of the snowGathering up the snow left in the garden following our snowman building, we placed it on a tray and brought the snow inside to continue our fun. The children chose their colours and painted on to the snow. As the snow began to melt the colours mixed together and the children became excited by this magic. During this activity the children deepened their understanding of colour mixing and also the changes of snow to water.
This week we have been engaging in all the fun that Easter brings. We dyed eggs with leaf prints, made Easter stained glass window pictures and made the classic bird nest cakes topped with mini eggs. We were lucky enough to see (and hear!) the frogs mating at forest school this week and had a close look at the early frog spawn. We will be follow the interesting frog life cycle over the coming weeks. The week ended in a big Easter egg hunt where the children found the Easter bunny had hidden some early chocolate lambs for them to enjoy over the Easter break.
Tot school is now closed for Easter while I enjoy a relaxing break with my family and fly off to Tunisia. I am hoping to bring some interesting objects, stories and photos home to share with the children on their return. Enjoy the Easter break! This week we traveled back in time to the world of dinosaurs.
We kicked off the week with a trip to the dinosaur park. We looked carefully at each dinosaur and talked about their differences. We also tried to remember the names of the dinosaurs. Back at Tot School we spent the rest of the week using the infomation we had gathered. We searched for dinosaurs in the sand and found them in our books. We made dinosaur bones from salt dough and used these in a range of ways from compairing sizes and measuring to making our own dinosaur skeleton. Salt dough was a real hit with the children so we also made dinosaur fossils. We had such a fun week and learnt so much about dinosaurs just by basing our play around dinosaurs. We have such a warm and sunny week and made sure we made the most of it by having two days out this week.
On Monday we visited the local Zoo and enjoyed playing on their new outside play equipment. The children loved seeing the crocodiles again and watching the spider monkeys search for food. On Friday we visited Wroxham Barns and fed the baby lambs their milk which the children thought was amazing. The rest of the week the children looked at 'Jack and the been stalk'. We read and talked about the story, acted with puppets and planted our own beans. We can't wait to see how tall our bean stalk grows! |
AuthorI have worked with children for many years. I believe in child led learning though play and exploring the outside world around us. I have 4 children which are the centre of my world. Archives
April 2016
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