April Newsletter 2019

Blueberries and Strawberries

Playing in the Garden

In April our babies have loved going out in the garden and taking advantage of the lovely weather we have had. Our Blueberries have enjoyed playing in the ball pit and particularly playing with the cars on the track that we made in the garden. The Strawberries have been busy exploring the big garden, mud kitchen and big sandpit. They love building sandcastles and baking “cakes” with sand. They enjoy the challenges that this environment provides them with especially using the climbing and balancing apparatus, this helps improve and develop their gross motor skills. We have utilised our outdoor time this month. When the weathers nice we are usually outside all day!

All the babies have enjoyed messy play throughout April, particularly painting and drawing. This helps them to develop their palmar grasp and to use their thumb and index finger to pick up smaller objects. We used our paint sticks and some Lego blocks to paint with, the babies really like using different things to paint with as it provides variety and helps the babies use their imagination more. Painting makes a wonderful mess and sometimes we even end up painting the floor and the tables! Painting also helps babies to understand sharing as they have to take turns with paint sticks and let their friends take turns printing with the Lego blocks.

Tuff tray activities

Tuff trays are a brilliant resource for helping us to create and present a huge variety of activities from small world to messy. We have had a variety of different tuff trays activities this month including a dinosaur themed tuff tray and an under the sea themed tuff tray. These activities encourage imaginative play and communication and help us to model and expand language for our babies. They present excellent opportunities for us to model single words which the babies are keen to use, words such as “dinosaur” “shark” “fish” “bubble” “sand” and “grass” and sometimes this encourages our babies to ask for songs to sing along with the tuff tray. Our under the sea activity inspired us to sing ‘Baby Shark’ which the babies now love! (sorry!) We like to link songs to activities to expand the babies learning so that it is easier for them to relate things in the future, for example when they see a fish they will think of the noise it makes or when they see the bubble wrap they want us to get the real bubbles out. It is a way for us to incorporate the children’s interests which means we can encourage children to take a lead in their play and expand our child lead planning, which is fun for everyone!

Raspberries

Stem Activities

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. These may seem like lofty subjects when we are talking about children aged 2yrs but in fact we use these subjects throughout the children’s play. When we make play dough with them and talk about weights and measures, when we show them how to build ramps for cars or balls to roll down and discuss which roll most quickly, when we encourage them to collect leaves, conkers, acorns, flowers in the garden and talk about what we have found, in all these activities we are broaching STEM. This month we decided to focus on incorporating more of these activities into our planning. This all started from our planting activities last month, our children really began to show a lot of interest in the growth of the plants and flowers in the garden and were asking lots of questions about the growth. One of our Children asked ‘when will it grow big like me?’ with another asking ‘will it be ready and pretty tomorrow?’ To answer all of these fantastic questions and to feed the children’s curiosity, we decided to set up another planting activity where the children would be able to see their flowers and plants grow from the root. To do this we used some zip sandwich bags and added some soil or some cotton wool, we let the children choose between two different materials so we could see which one would grow faster. The children then added a seed to their bag and a small amount of water, we then stuck our bags to the window so the seeds can receive light and the children can watch them grow. We feel that STEM activities are really beneficial for our toddlers, alongside them being a really cool, fun activities it also breeds curiosity which is always a good thing!

Mark Making

The Raspberry children love to get messy whilst experimenting with different colours and textures. They really embraced this in one of our activities this month that was particularly enhanced by 2 of our children. While taking part in a painting activity we asked the children what else they might like to paint with when they suggested using their hands. We instantly thought this would be a great idea and encouraged them to get stuck in painting their hands and putting their hands straight into the paint tray. They then began printing their hands onto the paper and comparing the different shapes and sizes of their hands. After the children noticed they could make marks with their hands they began thinking about different things they could mark make with. Together they came up with the idea to use trains which they rolled into the paint then onto the tuff tray to make some lovely marks. We found this activity really good for enhancing the children’s physical development by improving their fine motor skills and also a really great way of encouraging team work.

Space Shape and Measure

This month as an adult led theme we decided to work lots on our Maths, Shape, Space and Measure areas of learning. The children really enjoy working on their shapes and loved this activity. We provided lots of different shapes of different colours and sizes and made this a fun arts and crafts activity. The children spent some time categorising the shapes into different pots and naming the shapes and colours as they were doing so. We then provided some glue and card for the children to choose their shapes and make a fun colourful picture with them. In order for the children to use the shapes they had to be able to tell us what shape they wanted and what colour the shape was, this was a great activity for allowing the children to work at their own level and to improve their knowledge on shape, space and measure. We feel that math activities are best in a group as all children work at different levels and it allows children to learn from each other e.g. one child might be encountering a mathematical concept for the first time through the activity while another may be developing their understanding of the concept and a third consolidating their knowledge.