Sensational Stories at Children 1st @ Toton

Wow! What a magnificent week the Early Years have enjoyed. As you can read below, their week has been bursting with great activities inspired by ‘Sensational Stories’.

On Monday, the story of focus was ‘Monkey Puzzle.’ The children engaged with a range of activities including collecting and cutting leaves using scissors, looking at animal habitats, textures and building dens and enclosures.

On Tuesday, the children looked closely at the story of ‘The Gruffalo’. This story is a firm favourite at nursery and really sparked the children’s interest. We read the story in small groups so we could look at the Gruffalo’s appearance in detail before the children created their own clay representation.

On Wednesday we explored another popular story, ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.’ The children first created their own bear hunt maps by cutting and sticking the images in the corresponding order to the story. From this, the children then made their own textured collages to aid independent re-telling of the story.
To complete the day, the children were very excited to participate in the bare foot walk. This involved walking through different textured trays to experience a sensory trail using their feet and encouraged the children to use vocabulary influenced by the story to describe the textures.

Thursday saw the arrival of World Book Day. The children looked amazing dressed as their favourite book characters and it provided them with the opportunity to share a variety of stories with their friends.
Additionally, we used the story ‘What the Ladybird Heard’ to engage with various sound and listening activities.
The children demonstrated their listening and phonics skills during our baking session. Here, the children listened carefully to the ingredient names before selecting the correct word, image and amount on visual prompt pieces for each ingredient.
Next, they visited the table shop where they collected the correct ingredient to add to our cake. The visual prompt cards were used to help identify ingredients in the shop and weigh the amounts until the numbers matched on the scales.
The children also demonstrated their phonics and number skills by finding all of the correct letters and numbers during our garden hunt games.

To complete the week, the children expressed great interest in the story ‘Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs.’ The children used the dinosaurs to build their own stories in the dinosaur world and created a fizzy volcano using baking soda and white vinegar. They were amazed by the volcano and it encouraged them to experiment further by adding different amounts of baking soda and vinegar to create the biggest reaction.
Fantastic dinosaur fossils were also created using special fossil stones, mini dinosaurs and salt dough.

What a fabulous week we’ve all had!