We have had lots of new faces come and join us in the Burrow the past few weeks and as everyone has started to settle in the older Burrow children and staff have been showing our new children what we have on offer and here's a few things we have been up too.
Developing our Mark Marking
We have a range of mark making resources and activities on offer in the Burrow; what always seems to be a hit are pens and paint. We have recently been given some wallpaper which we have rolled out along the table or even rolled out on the floor. Having a large amount of paper really show’s how much concentration our Burrowers had whilst they were drawing and mark making. It gave them the space to be able to draw demonstrating their gross motor skills but also providing the opportunity for them to draw more finely if they wanted too. We have made use of the wallpaper for our painting too. We have purchased some rollers which have different textures and patterns. Again having the wallpaper allowed the Burrowers to be able to do continued rolling or stick to short strokes. We used different coloured paints which were able to mix together to create different colours and before long, our roller painting turned into good old fashioned hand painting!
Growing Friendships
It’s been exciting for our new Burrowers to come in and see what provision, resources and activities we have on offer to learn, develop, explore and play which supports the ability for the children to meet and grow friendships with our other Burrow children. Recently we have had some children ask for “Music”, so we used our CD player and it was lovely to see how some of our children instantly mixed and held hands with each other to jump and dance around together.
Circle Time
The always popular Songbox, The Scrunchie, Memory Game, Stories, Soundcards are our tools that we use for Circle, however, over the past few weeks we have been focusing on our Emotions. We use our Teddy Bear emotion cards, we look at the Teddy Bear’s one by one and ask the children what the Emotion is and whether there could demonstrate the facial expression; grumpy, happy, shy, surprised, sad and tired face! Although when I do my tired face the children normally just shout at me to wake up!! Going through the cards enables to talk about how or why we might feel like that, for example a surprised face – we could have a surprised face if Nanny or Grandad are picking up or a sad face if you fell over.
We have also been venturing around the Farm, Paddock and in the main garden where we have been enjoying Forest School activities and the very muddy puddles!
Thanks for reading
Nicola