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Whatever next?

Friday 17 November 2017

We have had a great time this week using the story ‘Whatever Next’ to stimulate our learning and play. We loved creating our own small world area to retell the story and take Teddy on his adventure to the moon. We made our own moon paintings, colour mixing black and white to make grey. Some children wanted to make things ‘more silver’ so set about using tinfoil to wrap up stones, or should we say ‘moon rocks’.

 

We had lots of fun investigating in the water tray… Look what happened when we used the funnels to fill the bottles! Children loved watching the water come out of the tiny holes and it provided lots of opportunities to talk about capacity.

During group time we introduced ‘dough disco’. This involves each child having a ball of playdough to manipulate into different shapes following the lead of the adult. Such activities are fantastic in helping develop dexterity, fine motor skills and finger strength.

After singing the rhyme ‘5 little men in a flying saucer’ the children had a great time using the large construction to make space rockets and spaceships to take them to the moon. We practised recognising the numbers 1-5, counting forwards and backwards as the spacemen got on and off the rockets. There has been lots of building, too, with smaller bricks which have resulted in some fantastic language as the children described their tall, short, bigger and taller constructions. We continued to sing lots of different nursery rhymes and used the puppets including a fish, a clock and a moon to play ‘guess the rhyme’. By using the recording pegs, the children were able to independently record themselves as they sang and then played their beautiful voices back for everyone to hear!

What we are learning this week

We’re going to continue with our ‘moon’ theme as we make craters in the sensory area using marbles and ‘moon dust’. We shall be painting onto tinfoil and printing using bubble wrap as we use different textures in our art work. We will be looking at pictures from the story ‘Whatever Next’ and thinking about the order the different events happened. This is a great way to not only stimulate talk but to help develop organisational and sequencing skills. We’ll be trying to remember all the things baby bear took in his picnic by playing different memory games. So we don’t forget, we’ll use different forms of mark making to write our own picnic lists. Once on the moon, we will start to think about who we might bump into! After reading the book ‘Q Pootle 5’, we hope to stimulate the making of some very colourful but friendly playdough aliens!

Reminders