Our First Blog

We are very excited to start our ELC blog. Firstly we would like to show you our indoor spaces; one of the children recently had a great idea that he wanted to make changes to our areas. He gathered his peers and told them his big idea. He wanted to move the story corner over to the window and the home corner over to the other side of the room. Most of the children moved the furniture and resources into the new spaces; Working together as a group or with a partner. 
The new areas are working well. The children are enjoying a cosy area for storytime/book nook they are all becoming more engaged in their play and we are continuing to plan around their interests. in the photos below are the mark making station, book nook/gathering area (christmas tree decorated by the children some lovely handmade baubles feature), gluing and sticking station and our loose parts area. 

Over the last month we have had provocations in our spaces promoting Christmas and winter experiences for all the children to explore. following on from this there has been many discussions about snow and ice (having snow to explore outside the other week spurred a lot of interest too) some of children worked together to make a "big snowball" pictured below. The room elf was found in the freezer last week. The children explored how to free the elf from the ice. they used tools to try to break the ice, cold water then a child suggested hot water they carefully poured this onto the ice/elf. one of the practitioner's talked about the roads being slippy this spurred a conversation about grit lorries using salt to melt the ice on the road a child then suggested we use salt to melt the rest of the ice. some of the children's vocabulary throughout "the ice is melting" "its so cold" "hot water makes it melt" the salt is making ice disappear it water nearly" "don't touch hot water it burny not safe to touch with your hand"