Fun times in March

March had amazing weather wise and so pretty much throughout the nursery a messy play festival took place as hands were once again prepared to explore cold materials and spend long periods wallowing in puddles of slime, clay, water, Gelli and paint without getting cold. Spring always brings about happy feelings in children and adults and coupling that to relaxing with silky sensory experiences is nothing short of relaxing and beautiful and a great way to start the bright middle of the year.

The Sea Turtles started the year interested in dens and this is an interest that is certainly continuing. One of the particularly fun dens was the little den around the sand pit that we made. They loved this and it made the sandpit an exciting new space for children to stay in for a long time digging, making moulds, driving vehicles through as well.

We have also been hanging and draping all sorts of fabrics, table cloths and saris from fences and gazebos to create little intimate spaces to play in. They make the children feel differently about areas and equipment they are familiar with and give them little places to play with their friends with a feeling of privacy, yet being still with the group.

Musical instruments and playing music with pots, pans, blocks has been explored well this month too in Sea Turtles. The children have been banging out supporting beats to tunes and just enjoying the loud sounds and noises they can make by themselves, with a friend and together in a group. They have also been enjoying playing the instruments along to nursery rhymes and songs being performed on the ipad.

The sensory area has been filled with new cushions and fabrics, furs, lights and so on. All of the children love the space and what was originally set up as a baby safe zone, has the babies fleeing from it and wanting to watch the big children in the active room and the big children retreating to it when they need a little time out. It is not quite what we planned for, but it is working beautifully and creating balance across the rooms as the children choose their zone according to their mood.

With the better weather, we have been able to set up a lot of lovely activities in the outdoors that we have been enjoying indoors throughout winter. Just being in a different space has encouraged the children to join in and want to spend longer working at the activities. So, we have been bringing outside all of the activities for some new life and variety, including the indoor climbing equipment. It is amazing how just a different set up can inspire new ways of exploring what they have mastered in another context.

And then there has been the focus on emotions. Big emphasis on being kind and caring, happy and sad, excited and angry has been carried out through creative and circle time activities especially. Watching the children look at images of sad faces and then pulling sad faces, then laughing has been very funny for of us- children and adults. It has been really sweet watching their understanding of face parts and putting them on paper to make faces. Some of our biggest toddlers have even been able to say ‘happy face’ or ‘sad face’ with their collages and then pull the face to show us.

The Dolphins carried on their focus on animals with the big finale being an excursion with a few children to the local pet shop to buy some Guinea Pigs. Once they were back at the nursery with all the kit the children prepared the Guinea Pigs new home, offered names for them and enjoyed the novelty of their new friends.

We’ve had them for a couple of weeks now and although we have had some moments where we have feared for the little pigs hearts to hold out, the children have increasingly cared for them, held them gently and are really starting show a sense of care and appreciation that they are like giants to the guinea pigs and so need to be quiet and careful around them. They enjoyed the naming ceremony as we put all their contributions into a hat and drew names for them. Originally Kip and Butterfly, but we had to rename them to Kip and Silky as the Sea Turtles refused to accept that one was called Butterfly when it quite obviously was not one!

The older children in Dolphins have really started to enjoy group games of Tag, Hide and Seek, What’s the Time Mr Wolf and Crocodile. They are increasingly understanding the objectives of the games, strategies for winning and noting patterns in other children’s actions and then being able to predict their actions and decide what they will do. They have such fun working it all out and it is so fun watching them.

Animal art has been expressed through collaging with animals prints, making animal masks and animal book marks. The Animal Boogie has been boogied along to as well. We have always had the book, but now have the interactive version on the ipad that the children love to sing-a-long and dance to.

Pre-schoolers chose their favourite animals that they wanted to research and worked on making little information books about them. They also did a lot of information gathering and research on the ipads about the differences between pets and wild animals and the different foods they eat and homes they live in.

Our daffodils seemed like they were the last in London to bloom and the children daily looked in our planters and commented on all the locations that they were blooming in their gardens, the parks and along the streets. When they finally did bloom, the children were so excited and pleased that they showed every adult and child who walked through the door that they were there. 

With the daffodils sprouting, the flowers growing on the fence, the buds falling into our playground (and annoying us!), it is the annual Dolphins excitement about change. It is wonderful when they start bringing in stories about ducking and goslings, talking about the flowers in their gardens and noticing all the changes in their environment. With the Dolphins children, the sense of wonder is also in seeing them remember events associated with the nicer weather from last year and being able to remember planting  the bulbs months earlier and knowing which ones they planted and tracking the changes. 

We had a little further development of the flower garden in the car park this month. The Sea Turtles came to help too by scooping up the dirt and taking it out of the bed. The ground is full of dead soil, rocks and old chunks of concrete so we have had little teams of children scooping it up so we can replace it with something a flower might grow in!