What are we doing in Dolphins in June?

Exploring growing and changes in animals has moved into growing and changing in the environment in general. So many changes this last month with the leaves, flowers and everything happening all at once. We usually explore growing plants for food and pleasure well before June, but this year, our everlasting winter has pushed it right to June!

The activities this month will be based around the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) areas of learning:

Prime areas:
PSED: Working together as a group to develop our window boxes and pots. Gaining a sense of contribution. PD: Learning how to use and manipulate gardening tools. C&L Learning new words to describe change and growth and also the names of the different tools, containers and items we are using to support the gardening. Also names of plants and the stages in their lifecycle.

Specific areas:

L: Introducing a variety of fiction and non-fiction stories on growing. Looking at text as a way of labelling the different parts of plants. M: Looking at shapes in the natural environment. Thinking about the ‘time’ it takes for growth and lifecycles. Measuring- how long, short, tall, wide, the plants are. EA&D: Experimenting with a variety of ways to create interesting and vibrant mages of spring.

Some of the activities we will be doing this month to support this will be:

·         Flower printing. Manjit will be supporting the children to make images of flowers using the end of bottles as prints.

·         Cress growing. Christine H will be working with the children on growing cress and using it to then make cress sandwiches to try for tea.

·         Sunflower pot decorating. Marie Claire will be working with the children to decorate their own pots to grow sunflowers in. She will then work with the children on tracking their growth.

·         Piñata. Laura Z will be making a piñata with the children in the shape of a flower. Once finished they will knock it open for the flower seeds to spill out for them to plant.

·         Pop up flowers. Matt will be working with the children on making pop up flowers for the children to pretend to water and grow.

·         Grass heads. Jenny will be making grass heads with the pre-schoolers. Measuring how fast they grow, comparing growth, etc.

·         Shopping for plants, seeds and equipment. Jenny and Manjit will be taking some children on excursions to Homebase to buy seeds, plants and items for gardening.

·         Plant prints. Shilpi will work with the children to examine different parts of the plant and then taking prints from them.

What you could do to support your children at home:

·       Share with the nursery any gardening your children do at home. Send us your pictures for children to talk about together and for us to display.

·       Bring in your seedlings. If you have any seedlings you have too many of, let your child bring them into nursery to contribute to our garden.

·       Share books, research on the internet, take note in the environment, spend time talking about all changes that take place through growth.

·       Use language they can manage and use to describe the different parts of plants; roots, stem, leaves, seed, seed head, seed pod, petals, flowers, buds.

·       Use language to describe the changes the plants are making; growing, getting longer, bigger, bushier, fuller, changing colour, bursting, flowering, opening, etc.