Painted Pumpkins

The children were so excited about buying the pumpkins in preparation for Halloween so I wanted to get them more involved. Obviously they are a bit young for carving so we decided to decorate them first.

We used the pearl acrylic paints straight from the bottle so that they would be easy to squeeze out. Whilst some simply squeezed the colours directly onto the top of the pumpkins and let the paint dribble slowly down the smooth surface of the pumpkin, others used their pumpkin as a canvas and requested paintbrushes to mix up the paint. 

The colours all began to blend together and actually looked quite stunning pieces of art although they did take several days to dry and were only just ready in time for carving our halloween faces! Once lit, the children were delighted with them. 

Halloween Sensory Tray

The children are becoming aware that it will soon be halloween so I decided to incorporate a little sensory fun into our day with this Halloween themed sensory tray. 

 Our tray contains a few halloween themed items such as cups, spoons, spooky shaped cutters and some plastic fingers and skeletons for effect but the main fun comes from the orange lentils and the black beans. As ever with the sensory trays, the pouring and scooping of the beans brought out some lovely imaginative stories as well as enabling the younger ones to practice spoon control. 

Rolled Conker Art

We have been out and about in various parks and the children had collected a lot of lovely shiny conkers. After playing with them for a while I decided to add some paint and shake things up a bit! The children had a lovely time choosing colours, shaking their paintings with some eye catching results.

Using a washing up bowl, some paper and a handful of conkers, the older children chose the colours of paint they wanted to make blobs with and squeezed some blobs onto the paper. We opted for autumnal colours in line with our Autumn theme this month but any colours would work. They then began to shake and roll the bowl to make the conkers move. 

As the conkers travelled through the paint they transferred it all over the paper in a lovely, unpredictable variety of lines, colours and patterns and the colours blend together to make some beautiful marbled effects and produce some lovely abstract artwork.

Drain Pipes

Often the value of enabling children to play with natural materials is forgotten in a world where we have such a variety of, often expensive, toys. This afternoon our garden play session reminded me of the value of natural objects in encouraging the children to question what they can do with these things. 

Banging the pipe to make noise

Jumping over the pipe

Balancing a ball on top

Attempting to stand the pipe up

Flowing water down the pipe

Children aged from one to six years of age chose to play with the pipes at some point during this afternoon and, as demonstrated above, they all came up with a different purpose for the pipe and demonstrated that natural curiosity that comes from having open ended resources.

Pumpkin Watercolours

As we are approaching halloween I introduced a bit of pumpkin themed watercolour painting today. After using black glue to paint the faces of the pumpkins I let the boys loose with the watercolours. The black glue forms a raised edge that enables the children to paint inside while the face still stands out.

The children started off painting orange like the pumpkins we had looked at although others prefered to personalise their picture with some purples! The raised surfaces helped the older ones to enhance their fine motor skills through helping them paint within the eyes and nose.

The end result was some lovely colourful pumpkins to add to our display!