Chinese New Year & Pancake Day!
The preschool children have had the opportunity to engage in many activities throughout the week to celebrate Chinese New Year. The children were admiring the Chinese New Year lanterns and dragon decorations when coming in to nursery and were very keen to paint many materials to help put together their own 3D dragon ready for the group dragon dance. The children have taken a large interest in the story ‘The Great River Race’ at group times, and have been very intrigued to find out which animal represented their year of birth. Some of the preschool children enjoyed a literacy activity, discussing and comparing how different the writing was for Happy New Year in English and in Chinese, with some children challenging themselves to copy the Chinese writing. In the home corner, a group of children enjoyed dressing up in traditional Chinese themed outfits as well as dressing up the dolls in the same clothes and sitting them at the table too, whilst others concentrated to use some chopsticks to attempt to pick up some noodles to aid their imaginative play. The children took part in food tasting at tea time, whilst listening to the calming effects of Chinese music playing in the background.
The children have also been celebrating pancake day and as a part of the weekly cooking activity. A group of the children went on a visit to the local co-op to buy the pancake ingredients, before brining them back to the nursery for everyone to take part in a weighing activity and mixing the eggs in to the mix. The cracking of the eggs was very amusing for several children, laughing together at the anticipation of the eggs cracking. The children also enjoyed a play-dough pancake flipping game outside in the garden using small frying pans. They were so proud of themselves and each other each time they caught the pancake in the pan, cheering each other on as they took it in turns to watch each other. Another group of children chose to use the playdough in the mud kitchen, using the rolling pins to flatten out the dough and then collected some bark, mud and fallen leaves to decorate their pancakes with various toppings.
Reading, Cooking & Exploring!
The toddlers have been looking at February’s book of the month, Owl Babies, where they not only read the story lots of times, but explored the story sack which contains different related props. A couple of the children carefully stroked the larger owl, while two other children huddled together with the three baby owls and spoke to them gently with a higher pitched tone, “Ahh… the little babies!” and carefully ran their fingers over their beaks and eyes. As we read the story together, some of the children showed lots of empathy through their ‘aww’ sounds when the babies were looking for the mummy owl, before let our a cheer when they were reunited at the end! The children then had the chance to try and act out the story as the props were added to a nature woodland scene. The owls were flown from a nest made of sticks and leaves to a tree stump, where the owls sat perched as some of the children began feeding them food from the home corner.
Whilst on a walk around the Imber Court grounds, the toddlers made their way to one of the fields where they ran as fast as their legs could carry them, circling the large area and twirling with their arms open wide. As they did this, a large flock of birds flew over, causing all of the children to pause and watch as they flew overhead. This then lead onto some of the children pretending to fly like a bird, flapping their arms by their sides as they moved around the grass. They then moved onto pretending to be owls like in the owl story and they began hooting and shouting “Twit-twoo!” as they ran. The toddlers ended their walk with a pit stop to splash in some puddles, give a quick hello to the ducks and horses and stop off for a snack on the picnic blanket and returning to nursery to tell their friends of their journey.
Over the last couple of weeks the Under Two’s have been showing a lot of interest in the home corner whether it be cooking, cleaning or playing with the dolls. One morning during free play, one of the children picked up the whole box of toy food and transported it over to the home corner kitchen. After placing it down, a few others took an interest and approached. They began taking out the food, one piece at a time and placed it onto the side. Another child reached under into the cupboard and took out some pots and pans. As the children looked around, a child said, “Cook, cook” as they pointed at the pans. They began placing food items into various pots and pans and continued chatting together saying, “Oh hot, blow, blow!”, as they stirred and cooked the delicious food together. The children were even able to begin learning some new words such as ‘stir’ ‘yum’ and ‘mix’.
Outside in the garden, there has been a lot of exploration with new things such as the rolling wall. The children began by interacting with the wall how they usually would, which is rolling small colourful balls from top to bottom. As a small group of them did this, another child walked around the garden as if looking for something. He looked high and low and eventually came across a pine cone, picking up a few as he found them. He then walked back over to the rolling wall and set a pine cone rolling down from the top. As the pine cone rolled down, it wobbled about and half way down jumped over the edge. Everyone let out a little scream and a giggle as it made them jump and that was the new game from then on. Some children even continued to explore and find other objects that would roll down the wall differently to the balls.
Building Castles & Experimenting with Colours!
Over the last couple of weeks, the preschool children have shown lots of interest in role play and small world play. Outside in the garden, a group of children worked very hard as a team to build a car garage, a bridge and a car slope with the large wooden blocks. Some of the children were comparing the sizes of the cars that they were playing with and working out which ones would fit in to which sized hole, which they called the car parking spaces. Other children were discussing having to cross the bridge to get to the car slope, whilst others used the chalkboard behind to draw the road for the cars to drive along, ensuring that there was roundabouts for the cars too. Afterwards, the children moved on to build a castle, making sure there was space for a door and some seats to sit down on.
The children engaged in a water play activity, washing, drying, dressing and caring for the baby dolls, showing a lot of care and attention and being gentle when drying and dressing the dolls. One of the children suggested washing the babies hair which made some of the other children laugh and remind them, “The babies don’t have real hair!”.
The preschool children were involved in a colour mixing experiment, using various tools and colours to mix together to make different colours and adding white for different shades of each colour. Some children selected to use the dabbers to individually print the paints on their paper whilst others used glue spatulas to move paints from one pot to another, mixing them together, fully engaged as they discovered that the colours started to change!
