This week, the outdoors at Peacock Lodge was full of wonder and excitement for Kindergarten One as the children enjoyed opportunities to move, explore and investigate. Water play was, as ever, a favourite, with children filling and emptying containers and watching water flow down chutes and over benches. The arrival of a few puddles led to plenty of enthusiastic stomping and jumping! The children also explored large-scale vertical painting using brushes made from rosemary and catnip, developing their mark-making and gross motor skills.
Kindergarten Two continued their mud-making adventures at Forest School, building on the children’s interests from last week. A pizza station was created using log slices covered in mud and decorated with pinecones and pebbles. This also provided a meaningful opportunity to reinforce their classroom phonics learning of the ‘p’ sound. The children also explored autumnal colours, painting logs and other natural materials.
At Kindergarten One’s Forest School, the children enjoyed the rhyming story Chocolate Moose for Greedy Goose. Inspired by the story, they created their own chocolate moose from mud, cooked carrots in the mud kitchen and explored filling and emptying with pasta, extending their learning through play.
Kindergarten Two embraced the autumn season by creating leaf rubbings. They carefully positioned fallen leaves beneath paper before using wax crayons to reveal their beautiful shapes and patterns. Using playdough, they also experimented with cutting out leaf shapes and making impressions with different leaves.
Reception used a range of autumnal natural materials, from leaves to flower petals, to decorate wooden spoons and create imaginative nature puppets. The children enjoyed expressing their creativity and developing their own unique puppet characters.
As part of their maths learning, Reception also visited a horse chestnut tree to collect conkers and estimate how many would fit into containers of different sizes. At Forest School, they discovered more about conkers and their life cycle before using mallets to break them into pieces and, with the addition of water, create their very own conker soap. We look forward to putting it to use in future Forest School sessions!
