Monday 30 September 2013

October Topic

Throughout October we will be looking at Autumn



We will have fun collecting signs of Autumn out in the parks and then using these to make collages as well as talking about Autumn, looking at what the animals do in Autumn as well as using the apples falling from the trees to make some colourful paintings. 

Wednesday 25 September 2013

Birthday Cakes!

This week was one of our little ones 3rd birthdays. He was so excited about it so I thought it would be nice to celebrate by making some cakes which fits in nicely with our food topic for the month. This idea went down very well with the boys. 


The boys identified the ingredients, helped with the measuring, stirred the cake mixture and then spread the icing in preparation for their decorations. Baking helps the children's learning in so many ways from sharing the stirring (social development) and talking about volumes of ingredients (numeracy) through to the use of new vocabulary (communication and language) and watching the cakes rise in the oven (understanding the world). Most importantly, everyone had fun!


When the cakes were ready we thought it was only right to find some candles and the older children enjoyed singing 'Happy Birthday' to the birthday boy who was ever so focussed on blowing those candles out!

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Homemade Pizza


As we have been looking at food this month I thought it would be fun to make our own lunch. We decided to make pizza, much to the boys delight. We first wrote out a shopping list of the things we may need and then went to the shops to choose our pizza toppings. The boys learnt about the different vegetables and fruits and helped to count out the money to pay the cashier. 


Back at home there was great fun as the pizza sauce got spread across the pizza base and the cheese was added. The children then chose the toppings that they wanted to put on the pizza and placed them on the top. 


After a quick play the pizza was ready and appeared to go down very well by all the boys! This was a lovely way of introducing talk about fruit and vegetables, enhancing fine motor skills through placing the items on the pizza as well as extending numeracy through counting out pieces of pizza and money.

Thursday 5 September 2013

Play Dough Mats

We play with play dough a lot here so I was really pleased with these themed mats that I found that gave us some more ways to use our play dough while enhancing the children's creativity, fine motor skills, numeracy and literacy skills. In line with our current theme I made some food related mats that were a huge success. 





We made up two colours of play dough and each child chose a mat. I helped them read the text and then they set to work. Initially they followed the simple instructions such as making sausages to go on their BBQ as well as counting out cakes to put on the tray.




After swapping their mats the children then returned to using the dough to make up stories about dinosaurs and crocodiles which is always lovely to watch!

Sunday 1 September 2013

September Topic

During September we will be looking at the subject of food


We will talk about where our food comes from as well as using our pennies to buy some food from the shops. We will also use our home corner as a shop for role play games. 

In addition to talking about healthy foods and playing the lunchbox counting games, we will weigh out ingredients and, most importantly cook some food that we can eat for our lunch.