Hello Hello! Can You Clap Your Hands?
The Kissing Hand
Days of the Week Song
Homemade playdough recipe
Loose parts play
Loose parts play means endless play! Loose parts are open-ended materials that can be assembled, combines, and manipulated in a variety of ways and have no predetermined play pattern. Loose parts can be either natural or synthetic. It is helpful to think of loose parts as something that will help children inspire imagination and creativity on their own terms and in their own unique way. Some examples of loose parts are sticks, leaves, seashells, seeds, pebbles, cups, buckets, blankets, ribbon, buttons, straws, boxes etc.
Access to a variety of transient materials during play and exploration helps children to improve their problem-solving skills and creativity. It also enhances children’s concentration, hand-eye coordination, fine and gross motor development, language and vocabulary building, mathematical and scientific thinking.
Water play
Water play is by far the easiest to prepare and the most loved activity by young learners! Add soap, sea animals, numbers, or anything that your little one would like to play with to make water play more engaging. You can also give your little one a small basin filled with water and a paintbrush. Children will have the opportunity to water paint and scribble. This helps develop fine motor skills, tripod grip, and imagination.
Reading to your children
Books are the gateway to building vocabulary, learning about print, and developing listening and early literacy skills. When you read, talk about the book. Discuss the characters and setting, make predictions, and create new endings. Point out letters and words in the text, and encourage them to recognize rhyming sounds and words and to identify beginning and ending sounds.
The benefits of reading to children cannot be overemphasized. You, as a parent, can form your children’s reading habit by starting them early. The loving environment created by reading to your young children will help them associate reading with your warmth, and this conditions their minds to feel that reading is a positive, pleasurable activity.
Learning through play
Play is one of the main ways in which children learn and develop. It helps to build self-worth by giving a child a sense of his or her own abilities and to feel good about themselves. Because it’s fun, children often become very absorbed in what they are doing.
Play is very important to a child’s development, it is an integral part of a child’s Early Years Foundation Stage and supports their learning journey too. Young children can develop many skills through the power of play. They may develop their language skills, emotions, creativity, and social skills. Play helps to nurture imagination and give a child a sense of adventure. Through this, they can learn essential skills such as problem-solving, working with others, sharing, and much more.
It’s important that learning is fun at this age. It needs to be about doing things with them that they like. They might find unusual ways of doing things – for a toddler, building blocks aren’t just for making towers, and paint can be used without a brush! Show them how things work, but if they want to experiment, let them.
Children learn through all their senses through taste, touch, vision, hearing, and smelling. They will watch those around them and copy language and behaviour.
Don’t push your child too hard. Children develop in their own ways and in their own time. Try not to compare them to other children. You can also encourage reading, by reading to and with them. Look at the pictures together; this will help younger children make sense of the words.
It’s also good to talk to them a lot, about everyday things while you are cooking or cleaning. This will give you a chance to teach them how things work and they will be able to ask you questions. Get ready for lots of “why’s?”
It’s not dirt- it’s my learning
I’m sorry that my uniform got dirty, but it shows you some of the things I’ll be learning throughout my time in school. Paint stains show that I am being artistic. I am trying so hard to develop my creativity, but sometimes it goes on my clothes. Mud and grass stains show that I have been outside developing my physical skills like running and jumping. This will help me to get better with small movements like writing. Marker marks show that I am developing my writing and drawing skills. Sometimes my uniform gets wet. I am trying hard to wash and dry my own hands. I also learn huge amounts of science and maths through water play.
Ms. Christabel's classroom 