sarah707

This week the children have been a little unsettled - I think the weather does it to them sometimes! We love going outside and mostly they are really happy to potter around the garden but this week it has been very wet and the grass was a bit slippy which led to a couple of small tumbles.

So, we have been bringing the outside into the house! We put down a big towel and covered it with leaves (all different colours, sizes and shapes) for the children to explore - some of the children used a lot of glue to stick their leaves to pieces of card while the older children spent a lot of time making models with their leaves - we looked at pictures of Oakie Doke on the internet for inspiration. This activity led to a lot of mathematical vocabulary being used by the children too and we have made a note of this in our activity evaluation to see if we can think of ways to extend their learning next time.

We had some playdough left over from the day before and they used this to push their leaves into - one child said he was making a ‘plaque’ like mummy had just bought for the front of the house! We made sure we got a photo of that one and wrote up an observation to share with mum later.

One day we were very brave and brought the messy tray into the house, sitting it on an old sheet. We put leaves, fir cones, twigs, conkers, acorns and other autumn treasures inside and sat back to see what the children would do. They were very excited and moved everything around, touching and noting the different textures.

One of the little ones scrunched up the leaves with her hands and lifted the litter she had made up using 2 hands, dropping it from a height back into the tray - we managed to capture this observation to share with dad too - we haven’t seen her do this before. Another child brought a box of dinosaurs to the tray and this started them on a new adventure as they fed their dinosaurs and walked them around in the leaf litter.

Hopefully the grass will dry a little over the weekend and the weather will brighten up so we can get outside more next week. If not… well our outside in week worked really well so we could always try that again and save our outside play for the park!