Story Sacks & Colourful Adventures!

The toddlers have been thoroughly enjoying looking at story sacks recently, in particular the ‘Gruffalo’ and ‘Night Monkey, Day Monkey’. When given the choice of all of the story sacks, Maximilian immediately shouted out “GRUFFALO!” and picked up the Gruffalo character from out of the bag. As the story began, each of the children held the character of their choice in their lap, with Maximilian holding up his Gruffalo again as it made an appearance in the story. Margaux looked through some of the other characters and began making animal sounds, with a “Twoooo” as she held up the owl and a “Ssssss” as she pointed to the snake, even repeating some of their names. The next story chosen was ‘Night Monkey, Day Monkey’ and this story sack was a little bit different, as the children were able to add each of the characters to a story board as they made an appearance. To start with, Sienna asked to put the first monkey character on and after carefully taking her time to place it on she leaned in, pressing her cheek against the monkey while saying “Cuddle”. Cora was up next and attached the bats with a proud smile, while Leo attached the ‘banana shaped moon’ with the comment “Banana in the sky!”.

Outside, the children have been loving the construction area and have enjoyed using the tools throughout the garden. Joseph packed up his tool box and took it to the sand pit where he grabbed a digger which he used to scoop up sand, “I building a house for my friends!”. Leo then began using a truck to do the same thing, digging a big hole to the bottom of the sand pit. Rafe and Arlo used the tools over at one of the tables to build aeroplanes, Arlo commented “I making a big big aeroplane like the one I flied in the sky” referencing paper airplanes he had played with earlier.

Over the last couple of weeks, the under twos have had a wonderful time exploring lots of bright and colourful activities and even learning some colours themselves. They have also been on a trip around the world, from the Arctic to the sunny desert, to see what animals they could find. Inside, the children took part in a sensory activity that included animals in shredded paper. The children took a huge interest right away and began to investigate the shredded paper. Leonardo began picking up huge handfuls of the paper and dropping it on his head, laughing with excitement, whilst Zachary sat himself down, right in the middle of the activity and played with the animals. Although the paper was I intended to be hay, the children began lifting handfuls of it and sprinkling it down onto the floor. Phoebe gasped and said, “Wow, snow!”. With that, she laid herself down, spread out her arms and legs and began making a ‘snow angel’. Her friends found this very funny and all joined in.

Whilst out and about on daily walks, the children have thoroughly enjoyed their trips around the Imber court grounds on their own little adventures, whether that be playing peekaboo in the play house of the playground or exploring nature in the fields. During one trip to the park, Sienna, Cara and Charlotte all head to the play house and ran inside. Each of them found a window, poked out their heads and began saying, “Hiya! Hiya! Hiya!”, as they waved their hands about. As they were saying a kind hello to everybody that walked by, Evelyn drove past in her Little Tikes car, “Beep, beep, beep!”, she said, as she waved back at her friends.