Road Safety Week

This week is national road safety week in England and we have used this as good reason to learn a bit more about road safety. While we are regularly crossing roads and road safety is an integral part of our daily routine but this week we have focussed on why we do things a little more. 

We have been out to our local park with the scooters and looked at the purpose of zebra crossings and how we hold hands near the road. 

We have used our cars at home to enhance awareness of safe places to cross the road as well as having a traffic light theme to some of our craft this week where the children talked about the colours of the lights and what they mean.

Planting Potatoes

Having registered with the grow your own potatoes project we were very excited to receive our potatoes through the post. We left them in the sunlight to toughen up for a bit while the children were fascinated with the shoots already coming out of the potatoes. 

It was then time to get our gardening gloves on! Armed with spades the children spent a long time filling up the black bag with the required amount of soil and then placing their potatoes in gently before covering them up. We talked about the things that the potatoes needed to grow and then took it in turns to add some water. 

After we had planted our potatoes we discussed the nutritious meals we eat that contain potatoes from baked potatoes through to shepherds pie. We now eagerly await the growth of the potatoes!

Homemade Pizza

As we have been looking at food this month I thought it would be fun to make our own lunch. We decided to make pizza, much to the boys delight. We first wrote out a shopping list of the things we may need and then went to the shops to choose our pizza toppings. The boys learnt about the different vegetables and fruits and helped to count out the money to pay the cashier. 

Back at home there was great fun as the pizza sauce got spread across the pizza base and the cheese was added. The children then chose the toppings that they wanted to put on the pizza and placed them on the top. 

After a quick play the pizza was ready and appeared to go down very well by all the boys! This was a lovely way of introducing talk about fruit and vegetables, enhancing fine motor skills through placing the items on the pizza as well as extending numeracy through counting out pieces of pizza and money.

Play Dough Mats

We play with play dough a lot here so I was really pleased with these themed mats that I found that gave us some more ways to use our play dough while enhancing the children's creativity, fine motor skills, numeracy and literacy skills. In line with our current theme I made some food related mats that were a huge success. 

We made up two colours of play dough and each child chose a mat. I helped them read the text and then they set to work. Initially they followed the simple instructions such as making sausages to go on their BBQ as well as counting out cakes to put on the tray.




After swapping their mats the children then returned to using the dough to make up stories about dinosaurs and crocodiles which is always lovely to watch!

Fruit Picking

Today we went fruit picking to pick some summer fruits much to the boys excitement. I have always tried to feed the children healthy meals and snacks and talked to them about this so fruit picking seemed a prefect way to make this more fun and let them see where their food comes from. 

The boys excitedly grabbed a contained each and chose to find some raspberries first. As soon as they were pointed in the right direction they shot off with their containers! We talked about just picking the ripe juicy red ones and leaving the green ones to ripen for other people. 

After rapidly filling a container of raspberries (and tasting just a few along the way!) the boys asked if they could pick some strawberries. After a lovely morning with tired boys and lots of juicy summer fruits we set off home. 

Using some of the fruit we had picked we made a smoothie to enjoy in the garden for afternoon snack - a great way of involving children in understanding where their food comes from and very tasty!