A Little More Nature on Tueaday

It was very exciting this morning to see our beans, sprouts and carrots all growing so well. Not as fast as Jack and the Beanstalk but fast enough to create a lot of delight. Today I put out some brown paper, leaves, twigs, pebbles and gumnuts with some paint and cotton buds. I gave no instruction to the children and the first to the table didn't paint, but rather used the nuts and pebbles as characters and asked each other "Who do you want to be?" The next children to the table painted on the paper and then others mixed the colours and painted with sticks and also cotton buds. We realised that pebbles become VERY slippery when covered in a layer of paint. We are going to keep our creations to use for a variety of different things, from counting, sorting and for props in the block area.

   

Nuts, leaves, pebbles and sticks.

The finished products. Now we can use them in a number of different play and learning situations.

Our sprouts: Week 1

Our beans: Week 1

We had a good look at the parts of our bean and painted it.

A variety of insects on the light table to sort and investigate.

Yellow playdough, a variety of leaves, nuts and sticks.

Look at our playdough creations!

Discovery tray with pebbles, plants, large insects and lawn. The children loved playing with these and it stimulated a lot of play. The plants looked a little worse for wear after the giant  insects had landed on them several times!

Happy Tuesday!

Nature on Tuesday

The weather is getting warmer which means we can make the most of the outdoor area and enjoy all of the wonderful learning experiences that we can have outside. We cleared the weeds out of the raised vegetable bed and planted some baby carrots. For the first time in ages we put water in the water trolley, pushed up our sleeves and had a great time.

We set up a 'Pie Shop' on the edge of the sandpit. Sticks were used for stirring, candles and as food! There were measuring spoons, potato mashers and all sorts of pots, pans and plastic crockery. We added egg cartons which didn't last very long as there was a lot of water used in our mud pies.

As beans are the fastest growing seeds that I know of, we planted beans in some disposable cups.

Hopefully next week we will have some lovely bean plants to look at. Jack and the Beanstalk was an obvious book to read and discuss and the children loved it. All children were hoping to grow a beanstalk like Jack.

We also planted some sprouts in a tray and watered everything -Very well!!

As we were talking about the needs of plants we examined some different leaves up close and made leaf prints in some lovely natural playdough.

Getting dirty and exploring things in nature made for a very fun Tuesday indeed.

See you next week.

Brown Day - Teddy Bear's Picnic

The children brought in their favourite teddy bear and we made very cute bear ears to wear. We painted little brown noses on all the children and ate lots of delicious food and had a beautiful Teddy Bear's Picnic!

Painting and printing with shaving brushes was great fun and created an effective fur pattern for the bears ears.

Coffee scented playdough, brown pop sticks, baskets, rolling pins and pasta teamed with a very cute espresso set made an authentic Italian café.

BLACK AND WHITE

Mixing black and white paint to make lots of shades of grey provided a lot of interest and painting on newspaper was far more interesting than painting on plain white paper! We used our farm animals, African animals and pet plastic animals as inspiration to paint some master pieces. Lots of great language was used and new words like 'Dalmatians' were learnt. It was a challenge for the children to wear black and white clothing but proved to be very easy for the adults, unlike some of the other colours.

As I had so much fun with the black and white theme I suggested that my daughter use the same theme for her birthday party. It was really effective and I couldn't believe how creative her friends were with their outfits and how beautifully they wrapped their gifts in keeping with the theme.

Black and white party ideas...

Black and white mugs filled with black and white treats as take home gifts.

Black and white treats to eat.

Black and white day at school...

Black playdough with silver glitter and plastic spiders.

Counting googly eyes.

Matching and counting legs for our black cats.

Yellow

The room had a warm, happy, yellow glow. Children were dressed in all shades of yellow including fluro and gold. We were spoilt with lots of healthy yellow food choices and sampled yellow apples, pears, bananas and cheese. Some of the fun yellow activities included...

Yellow play dough with yellow train tracks and accessories.

Gold coins, yellow containers, pegs and cups to explore at the light table.

Yellow paint, glitter and 'Snow' (shaving cream) for the children to finger paint with.

Blue sky, blue oceans, blueberries, blue birds...

Blue is such a beautiful relaxing colour and comes in such a wide range of shades from deep dark blue through to aqua and pale baby blue. Blue is an easy colour for everyone to dress in because everyone has a pair of denim jeans and who doesn't love wearing their jeans to school!

Blue day ideas...

  Blue playdough, blue popsticks and blue utensils. 

 Blue dinosaurs hidden in bowls of rice. 

Painting with frozen blue dye.  

Blue pegs to peg on blue containers. 

RED, RED, RED

This week we have been talking about the colour red. I LOVE RED. I get very excited about everything being red but I am not the only one! When all the children are dressed in red and the classroom is drenched in red the scene is impressive.

Red ideas...

Red playdough, roads, traffic signs and cars.

Sorting and counting red dinosaurs.

Red golf ball printing.