We have had a busy couple of weeks with welcoming lots of new children in the Burrow and exploring what we have to offer. We’ve have been…
Exploring our senses
- By making scented play dough using only 3 ingredients. We sat outside in the garden with a mixing bowl, corn flour, hair conditioner and glitter. Taking it in turns we poured some flour in, squeezed the lovely strawberry smelling conditioner in and added some sparkly red glitter! When we asked the children what it felt like, lots of descriptive words were voiced, like “soft” “hot” “smelly” “white” and so on.
- We made foamy sand using the special washing up liquid ingredient! We built with the sand using animal moulds, buckets and spades but most of all we enjoyed getting our hands very messy!
- Painting; We set out red and yellow paint along with a few Giraffes, Gorillas, Cows and Horses. We watched as the colours mixed together and the paint started to turn orange. We spoke about watching the colours change and an adult added “It looks like the colours of a fire” at this point a child replied “Yeah it looks like my fire”. Other times we have been offering free hand painting and asking children what they have painted. R told me “It’s my tiger, RAHHHH” and another child said “Look Nic Nic, it’s my mummy and daddy walking”.
- Making music outside in the garden. It’s amazing how anything and everything can make music. Whilst I was busy in the sand pit building a sandcastle, a child was nearby and asked me “Nic Nic, can you put music on?” Which I replied with “I don’t have anything to play music on but we could do some singing” the child repliled “It’s ok I found some over here” and the child had gone to the hanging saucepans, lids and tubes and started banging them together! R and I also had a wonder around the garden and used a tube to bang things to see what noise it would make, we hit the wooden car and discussed whether it was a loud noise or a quiet noise.
Fine motor skills
We have been focusing on our fine motor skills recently and carried out (an adult led!) cutting activity. An adult and 3-4 children sat down with a piece of paper each and a pair of scissors, the adult demonstrated how to use the scissors and snip the paper. Of course every child found their own way of doing it, but the concentration on their faces and the sense of achievement after the snipped edge of the paper was great to see. We have also been sticking and gluing. We filled a bowl up with multi coloured tissue paper and put out some PRITT glue sticks and some PVA glue with paint brushes. The children grasped different ways of sticking the tissue paper down, the majority covered their paper with glue first and then selected the tissue paper and stuck it down, others got the tissue paper first, applied glue to it and then stuck it on the paper.
Gross motor skills
We offer a range of gross physical equipment in the garden. We have balance bikes, scooters, diggers in the sand pit, big tractors, pallets and tyres to climb on! And much much more! In the Burrow we have a free flow system where children can come and go as they please, so there is always opportunities for them to have a quick go on the bike and then swap it for balancing and walking their way around the sand pit! Our children have seized this chance and have explored all the resources.
Role play
The den have recently made knights amour along with some swords and of course children in the Burrow have taken a shine! In the garden L was holding on to the amour and used a plastic tube as his sword and ran around the garden with a big loud “RAHHHH” involving himself with pre-school children! It’s lovely to see when the different age groups mix together and bounce off of each other coming up with new ideas of what to do next, what to be and where to go!
Dressing up has also been a big hit in the Burrow, from dentists and doctors, to builders, princesses and fairies. Our children have been deep in the dressing up box pulling out some new clobber to wear. Along with the doctors outfit we have a doctors kit, with a brief case, thermometer, stethoscope and syringe, J will sit down with M and lift M’s arm up saying “I just need to take your temperature” or listen to M’s heart using the stethoscope. M and F were looking at the stories together on the carpet, F then led down besides M, M put a blanket over F. M said “Are you ok? I’ll read you a story” and put her hand on F’s forehead and started telling F about the story.
We’ve had a lovely start to September with all our original and new rangers, getting used to the new environment and new friends and all the great things we have to offer!
Nicola