Spring 2025
We started the new year off with some new developments in our Pre-School garden. The wonderful addition of a large sand pit caused much interest and excitement to our outside learning. We began by talking about how to keep ourselves safe when playing in the sand and devised our own list of rules. We have used the sand pit for exploring wet and dry and trying to build the best sand castles as well as introducing loose parts to create structures, enclosures and villages. The children showed a lot of interest in houses and buildings so we set up a builder's yard with tools, planks, bricks and gutters to encourage open-ended imaginative play. This continued with our play inside and we investigated different materials and their properties. We introduced stories to support our learning, looking at The Three Little Pigs, Stickman and Stanley's Stick. We used sticks to measure with, build enclosures and dens, as well as use as paint brushes. We wrote letters to the three little pigs and walked to the post office to buy a stamp and post them. We explored the story of A Squash and a Squeeze, using this as inspiration to design the little old lady a new jug for her shelf after it was broken by the hen! We squashed and squeezed ourselves into small spaces and created enclosures for the animals in the story. We squashed and squeezed different materials eg playdough, clay, sponges, bubble wrap to explore their properties. We found out about repeat patterns and looked for them in the environment, then used loose parts to create our own repeat patterns. We explored the art work of Hundertwasser and painted some "lollypop trees" like his.
