Pancake Day

We started the day with our regular toddler group trip, the first time for our new mindee. He had a lovely time and was absolutely shattered after!

We then made the most of Shrove Tuesday and made pancakes! My two-year-old mindee enjoyed mixing and pouring the ingredients and we talked about the numbers on the measuring jug and what they are used for. Even more  fascinating was the fact that he was constantly using his imagination - pretending that the flour was a snowman and that the egg yolk was a spiders web!

Most importantly we all enjoyed eating them (even though one had to be thrown away after I dropped it during a rather poor pancake tossing attempt!). 

The whole process was summed up beautifully by the children:

Chinese New Year

I always like to try and educate the children about the world around them as much as possible.  We often look at other cultures and, in celebration of the Chinese New Year this weekend, we have had a Chinese theme to our play today. 

We made some Chinese paper lanterns. The children had great fun making marks on the paper in some traditional Chinese colours. They loved the fact that they could carry the finished product around with them!

The boys then had great fun exploring a chinese themed messy play with noodles and chopsticks. They really enjoyed, and were pretty successful, at picking up the noodles with the chopsticks and moving them into bowls. 

Finally we read Lanterns and Firecrackers, a story about the Chinese New Year with some lovely pictures of the new year celebrations. 

A New Arrival

Today was an exciting day for us as we had a new arrival starting with us to join in our fun and games!

The boys were very excited to have a baby coming to play and shared all of their toys very nicely with him. To keep everyone amused we spent lots of time watching (and chasing) bubbles blowing around the garden!

Toddler Group

We had a lovely time this morning at our regular toddler group. There are so many fun activities on offer I thought we would share some of this morning's pictures. 

In celebration of the Chinese New Year (The Year of the Snake) the boys made a colourful snake using glued tissue paper. 

They played with play dough, investigated water, did lots of colouring, ate a lovely big snack, drove around on the ride on toys and then sang songs. 

The children also had the chance to admire the lovely large hail storm that arrived just in time for us to have to go home in it. At least it gave us some more experiences for our weather topic this month! 

February Topic

Given the very changeable outdoor environment at the moment we are going to be looking at things related to WEATHER in February. 

We have a few exciting activities planned ranging from looking at weather pictures and books through to sorting clothes for appropriate weather. As ever, we will be doing several weather themed craft activities and, most importantly, going outdoors in all weathers to explore!