The Three Little Pigs 🐷🐷🐷

Construction

After reading the story, ‘The Three Little Pigs’, children enjoyed building houses using various construction materials including small wooden blocks, foam bricks, Lego, duplo and sticks! 

Materials Experiment 

Children made a house of ‘straw’, ‘sticks’ and ‘bricks’. They talked about what the materials felt like and whether they would withhold the ‘huff’ and ‘puff’ of the Big Bad Wolf! Children said that the straws could be “squished” and “blown” away. They thought the sticks were stronger than the straws but the bricks were “really hard” especially when joined together! They then used the hair dryer to test their ideas! The children were excited to discover that the straw and stick houses blew down, but the brick house stayed standing! The Big Bad Wolf couldn’t blow it down! 

Houses

Nursery enjoyed using sticks to explore the shape of a house and its features. They matched sticks to make house pictures and then explored making their own. They enjoyed using different coloured and textured shapes to fill in house shapes. 

Fine Motor 

Our continuous provision is full of opportunities to support the development of fine and gross motor skills. We recognise that all children are at different stages of their physical development, so we provide a wide range of activities to meet their individual needs.

Large-scale movements help children develop their core stability, shoulder strength and upper body control, providing important foundations for writing. Alongside this, smaller activities involving pincer grips, grasping and manipulating objects help strengthen the muscles in children’s hands and fingers, developing the control and coordination needed for mark making and early writing.

Our Creative Houses

Reception used their cutting, sticking and joining skills to design and create their own houses!

Junk Modelling Houses

Children recycled their boxes, containers and cardboard to make their own houses! We talked about the different rooms in a house and what you find in each room. Children talked about their favourite rooms. 🏠🏡

Local Area

Children enjoyed a walk around our school grounds and local area to explore and identify natural and human-made features in their environment.

The children were encouraged to observe their surroundings and identify features created by nature and those made by people.

We also explored the different types of homes in our local community, looking closely at flats, terraced houses and detached houses. The children noticed similarities and differences between the buildings and developed their understanding of the world around them.

Making Maps

Following our walk around the local area, the children were inspired to create their own maps, representing the places, buildings and features they had observed. They also made connections to familiar journeys, talking about things they see on their way to school and when travelling with their families.

Nursery children explored early map-making through hands-on experiences, using loose parts, wooden blocks and a variety of materials to represent familiar places and features. They developed their observational skills and understanding of their immediate environment through practical exploration and talk.

Reception created their own drawn maps, using their knowledge of the local area to represent familiar routes, buildings and landmarks. They began to develop an understanding of how drawings and symbols can represent real places.

Exploring Pattern- Yayoi Kusama

We explored patterns around us, looking closely at patterns on our clothes. We also looked at the work of artist Yayoi Kusama and her colourful spotty pumpkins.

Nursery children began by exploring patterns through music, songs and rhymes. They experimented with making repeated marks and dots using paint and cotton buds.

Reception children looked more closely at Kusama’s artwork, noticing the different colours, sizes and arrangements of spots. They painted their own pumpkins and used cotton buds to create patterns, developing greater control over their marks.

We will continue exploring and creating patterns throughout Autumn 2.🙂🎃

Comparing Environments

Children compared photographs of Crosby beach and a local park, identifying features such as the sea, sand, grass and trees. They discussed what was the same and different about the two environments. Some children could name the features and others could compare similarities and differences between the two places.