Sensory Play with Gloop

'Gloop' is a fascinating substance made by simply mixing cornflour with water. It is a solid that can be moulded but as it is lifted from the bowl it becomes liquid. Although it can get a bit messy the beauty of it is that when dry the gloop then brushes off of everything again! I thought it would be a perfect experience to share with my 11 month old mindee and he loved it. 

 After an initially tentative reaction I showed him how I could put my fingers in to life the substance out. He began to copy me and inspected the resulting gloop that was falling from his fingers. As he became more confident he began to use both hands, lifting it up much higher and trying to touch the gloop as it fell back to the bowl. Even after I had cleared the bowl away he found some on the table and took great fascination from running his fingers through it and banging it. 

This is a great sensory activity, encouraging little ones to use their senses and movement to explore and generally have fun!

Lavender Scented Salt

As it is the end of a pretty active week we settled for a more relaxing afternoon activity. Salt is great for children to practise mark making and through adding lavender oil we turned it into a relaxing sensory activity. The children thought the purple colour was pretty good too!

We are working on name recognition with some of the children at the moment so I helped them use their fingers to write their names in the salt. I then encouraged them to make their own marks using their hands, fingers and some simple tools. 

Through adding a few cups and spoons the children's creative abilities were demonstrated. Talking together they pretended they were in a milkshake shop, making up milkshakes with the salt and cups and handing them to each other. 

Painting Pebbles

Although it is still a little chilly down here in Devon we decided to make the most of the gorgeous sunshine and headed out to Wembury Beach. Wrapped up nice and warm the children had a lovely time chasing the waves, searching the rock pools and doing a lot of climbing. 

For a fun afternoon activity we though that painting stones would be a great idea. I set the children the mission of collecting their own stones that they would like to take home to paint. 

At home I gave the children some acrylic paints, glitter and googly eyes. This led to some lovely sparkly creations to remind us of our sunny day at the beach. 

Daffodils

Making the most of this gorgeous sunny weather we ventured out to the park. The children loved looking at the vast quantities of colourful daffodils that we saw during our walk and this gave me an idea for an afternoon activity. 

Showing the children the daffodils in our garden I then gave each child some yellow and some green paint and asked them to paint the daffodils. I thought their creations were lovely and they enjoyed trying to reconstruct what they had seen outside. 

The paintings above were done by a two year old, a three year old and a six year old and show the lovely developments in drawing as the children get older. 

April Topic

Over April we will be learning a little bit about the life cycles of some popular animals and plants. 

We will look at butterflies and frogs with the help of the popular books the hungry caterpillar and ten tiny tadpoles. We will go out to look for some frogspawn, plant some seeds in the garden and monitor cress growing indoors.