Fee Fi Fo Fum…

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I smell the blood of Green Room children!

It’s been so much fun exploring the opportunities afforded by the popular fairytale. We’ve read the story countless times and it’s woven itself through all the children’s play just like an enchanted beanstalk!

In our construction area, we have a fabulous castle in the sky! The children have loved using the green boxes to build the tallest beanstalk possible to climb up to the clouds. Look at the super teamwork that this inspired!

For our phonics we have been practising letter recognition by matching beans with letters on. You can see below how well the children managed this and some even wanted to write the words themselves!

We’ve been interested in the artist Yayoi Kusama who creates art using dots. After simply providing a blank sheet of paper, sticker dots and some images of her work, we saw this absolute work of art being created over the space of a week. We’ve loved seeing the children going back to it and having the opportunity to create whatever they want! There’s a lovely video here that you can watch with your child, plus activity ideas too.

Linked in to this theme, we’ve read Weasles with Measles, which is a story about two weasels who paint the woodland with spots and get covered with red dots themselves. Their mum thinks they have measles! We’ve had fun decorating trees and extended this outside with paint on our cable table!

For maths, we measured a collection of beanstalks using multilink cubes and practised vocabulary such as smallest, tallest, smaller and taller. We then tried ordering some characters from smallest to tallest. The children used lots of ingenious ways to compare the sizes of figures such as putting them back to back and getting down on the floor to get a closer look. We’ve also introduced a selection of 3D shapes such as ovoid (an egg shape) and sphere. We’ll move on to the angular shapes next week.

For outdoor learning, Jojo made binoculars with the children. They showed amazing creativity and concentration. We’ll be taking these on our next Muddy Morning outing and completing a nature scavenger hunt. What do you think we’ll find?

We’ve also been giving our garden a bit of a makeover for spring, including some bunting decorated by Green Room. Have a look next time you collect your little one… see what you can see (and hear!) that’s new!

See you all next week!

The Green Room Team

World Book Day 2024

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A big ‘World Book Day’ hello from all of us in Green Room! We have had a fantastic week celebrating and especially dressing up! Read on to hear about what we’ve been up to in Preschool…

Fee fi fo fum… that’s right – this week’s fairytale was Jack and the Beanstalk and the children just loved it! So much so that we’ve decided to continue with it into next week, so JoJo’s been preparing a special block-building activity for the construction area – watch this space! Here you can see the children planing their very own green beans so let’s see whose is first to sprout! Lots of lovely learning went on here, including listening and attention, life cycles, fine motor, curiosity and more. Let’s not forget getting our hands dirty, which we all love!

Our gross motor skills have also been given a workout during Stretch’n’Grow and play time in the construction area. Den building was popular – as it always is – and there’s a good reason why. Den building is a form of ‘enveloping’, one of the schemas that help children to figure out how the world works. The thinking behind this kind of repetitive play, as well as an explanation of all seven schemas, can be found here.

As part of our World Book Day activities, Jen taught our little authors and illustrators how to make their very own book. It was really tricky to fold the paper accurately and cut a straight line, but we all persevered and produced some lovely stories and pictures. If you’d like to try this at home, there’s a handy guide here.

Inspired by our Jack and the Beanstalk theme, we added soil and butter beans to the water tray and loved watching the children explore the textures and use language creatively to talk about what they were doing. We’re doing really well with recognising sounds now, so the addition of some simple c-v-c words on leaves also sparked interest. These are words which contain a consonant, vowel and consonant, such as ‘pin’ seen below.

Here are a few other highlights from our week, including lots of time in the garden due to the change in the weather, preparing for Mother’s Day, more fun with magnetic tiles (they’re out every day!), mini building with matchsticks and play dough, colouring castles in the sky, PE, a birthday and, of course, story time on the carpet.

See you next week for more fee fi fo FUN!

The Green Room Team