2-3 The Discovery Hub

We have continued to follow the children’s curiosity in minibeasts this week. 

Characteristics of effective learning – Playing and exploring 

As well as observing real bugs in the outdoor area, the children also played with small world toy minibeasts, representing real life experiences within their imaginative play and using vocabulary they have learned to name the minibeasts. 

Inspired by an illustration of a watercolour painted butterfly from our core story Butterfly, Butterfly, the children experimented with painting watercolour paints onto paper towel. The children were interested to observe how the watercolour paint spread out across the paper towel once they touched their brush to it. Some children named colours, others experimented with layering colours on top of one another, while others mixed the watercolours together in the paint palette discovering that they could make different colours. 

On Monday, the children enjoyed another super session of yoga with Fay. On Wednesday afternoon, the children who have attended the yoga sessions helped to teach some of their friends the song and yoga movements to ‘Fly like a Butterfly’. Before beginning we remembered that we say ‘namaste’. We also used coloured scarves to practice deep breathing in and out, blowing our scarves away while we did this. Yoga is a wonderful way to support holistic development, enabling children to develop physical skills such as balance and coordination, whilst also nurturing their growing self awareness and emotional wellbeing. 

Outdoor learning

The children have continued to explore using chalks for mark making on different textured surfaces outdoors. Some of the children created marks to enclose spaces, which they then used to represent objects e.g. the body of a spider. Through their mark making, the children are developing important physical motor skills as well as early writing skills as they begin to give meaning to the marks that they make.

We have enjoyed using large balls this week to develop skills of throwing with increasing aim, and trying to catch a ball using two hands. The children also practised kicking the balls on their own or with a peer. When playing together using the balls, the children were developing awareness of how to play cooperatively with each other at a shared activity. The children discovered they could kick the balls a long distance because they were lightweight! 

During this week’s forest school session for some of our older children, we collected objects of interest to us that we found and weaved them under elastic bands on our own individual boards. The children collected items including: leaves, bark, twigs, catkins and flowers. They talked about the colours and textures of the items.

Before we went to forest school this week it had been raining. The children listened to the sound of the rain dripping when the wind blew the trees and they laughed as they tapped tree trunks with sticks and the rain fell from the leaves onto their faces. Instead of the crunchy leaves under our feet like last week, this week we noticed the leaves were soggy and we also found that this brought out lots of worms, slugs and snails, which we had a fascinating time finding and observing! 

Story of the week: Butterfly, Butterfly 

Song of the week: Incy, Wincy Spider 

Makaton sign of the week: Butterfly 

Parents as Partners 

It is lovely to see children and parents choosing a book from the selection in the basket in our cloakroom area. Please feel free to change your child’s book as frequently as you would like. We love to hear feedback on your child’s experience of sharing the books at home with you, and you can provide us with a comment on the paper within your child’s plastic reading folder. Thank you for your support. 

We hope everyone has a lovely weekend.