Exploring Through Play

I had the privilege of visiting the WEAVE recycling centre in Leamington Spa last week and came away both impressed and inspired (as well as armed with a decent sackful of open ended 'waste' materials to try out in my setting :-) ).

I attended a course on Creating and thinking critically. We were first shown a short PowerPoint to show the benefits of open-ended play with recycled materials and to detail exactly how well it fits in with the new elements of the EYFS framework. Then, after exploration of the materials at hand, we were asked to create an exciting and stimulating environment that would help children to ask questions and give them an opportunity to try out new ideas and ways of thinking...we had 45 minutes until 9 reception children (4-5year olds) arrived!!! We had great fun and it was interesting to see how different each of the environments were. The children were lovely and engaged well with the materials (mostly!) :-) it was fascinating to see how they approached the materials and they gained in confidence in a short space of time - it was the first time they had been in this environment. Lots of them experimented with fitting, overlapping and threading - a common recurring concerto throughout the group and something I would want to plan for next time if I were to meet them again....sadly I will not!! But I am exited to try these resources out with my own group...watch this space!!

Making circles with natural materials :-)

Lots of den building going on this week!!

Today I encouraged groups of children to draw a portrait of themselves and write their name. We do it every year to see where they are in their development and to give us an indication of their progression by the time they leave us at the end of the year. I got the usual range -  a child scribbling, a series of unconnected lines and dots, a face with arms and legs coming off it and much inbetween....until this one child presented me with a picture that blew me away. In my 9 years of teaching, I have never seen such attention to detail. The child is 4 in a few weeks yet the 3 figures she drew had different facial expressions, one was facing sidewards and they all had fingers, hair, clothes, etc!!! WOW! She then proceeded to write 4 sentences underneath.....

New school year, new classroom layout!

The children had been engrossed in their play for some time when one child called me over and asked if he could tell me the story they had been working on. Here it is...

Once upon a time there was a car factory. It had lots of workers and all the cars lined up carefully when they needed fixing or upgrading.

One day, the queue of cars waiting to be seen was so long that some of them had to be turned away for the day and were asked to return the next day.

The large green truck was mad. He did not want to wait. He thought it was unfair so he did something bad.

He drove as fast as he could into the factory so nobody else could use the factory that day either. Everyone was very sad but luckily noone was hurt. The police came straight away and took him away.

He felt really bad and said sorry. Then he helped to rebuild the factory but a bigger one so more people could be seen at once. Then they were all friends and he was good from then on!!!

THE END

What happens when you add wooden blocks and sea creatures?? An unlikely combination I hear you say! We did just that today, along with a blue fleece and some fabulous Playmobil Mer people and the children came up with some fabulous ideas as per usual.

We had a zoo aquarium with a sunken underwater castle....

 A shark collection tank....

A coral reef area where the fish could hide...

We have had the Ipad blocks for about a year now (the free packaging that sandwiches each IPad when it is bought) and they are still as popular now as they were when we first introduced them. And with relatively few casualties despite them being trodden on from time to time! We have had them out every day this week and what I love is that the play and constructions change each time they are out :-)

On the first day the dinosaurs were in a multi-storey car park...in the next session they were at a theme park and mixed the long wooden blocks in with them to make slides. There has also been a castle this week and a mountain leading up to a volcano... Fab imaginative play for next to no money (well aside from someone having bought the IPads of course, but you get what I mean!!!)

We started read the book 'Surprising Sharks' this week with the children and surprising it definitely is!! Did you know sharks only kill around 6 people a year but that we kill 100 million sharks each year? Sobering thought! Anyway, we then decided to draw pictures of sharks and one of the options was to use candles to draw with to create wax resist pictures. It turned out that the candles were too hard to work with for most of the children (because you had to press so hard to make it work) but they had good fun trying and it was a great exercise for those finger muscles. In the end, we gave them silver crayons and then went over their lines with a candle before they put on the ink. I love the fact that each picture is unique, focussing on the aspects that each child saw as most prominent. Some focussed on the spots on the whale sharks whilst others thought the pointy fins were more important and naturally there was one who just enjoyed the sensation of the crayon on the paper.... :-D