Halloween and Reggio Emilia (Week beginning 19.10.15)…

Everyone’s in full autumn/Halloween swing as all the rooms have been enjoying some seasonal crafts and activities. The Chimps have been navigating cobwebs to find spiders for their sensory activity. On our few sunny days, they’ve ventured to the garden to find where the grownups hid the insects in wet soil. As the Chimps are quite fond of adding things to sand, this week they decorated pumpkins using coloured sand and glue. Some of the older Howlers are clearly showing a preference for using paintbrushes rather than their hands. They grow up so quickly. In the construction area, the Chimps have been exploring open ended resources such as empty tubes, tissue boxes and other miscellaneous items, investigating how they fit together and/or stack. They particularly enjoyed the sound of banging boxes together. There was a ball pit of sorts which invited all manner of crazy movement from the Chimps as they dived in. I don’t know what’s better. Bubble wrap or ball pits?

The Howlers have been a busy little pumpkin patch indeed this week. Using their ever so loveable hands, they created handprint spiders with googly eyes. The little ones have been offering me autumn delights whenever I enter the room as they’ve been using large seashells to hold their conkers and pinecones as they travel around the room. On the topic of travelling around the room, the littles ones had to balance as they walked along the spider webs, which were taped on the floor. n their brand new book area complete with a comfy sofa, the Howlers have been enjoying Funny Bones Mystery Tour. The children had to look through a peephole and identify the mysterious shadows, which turned out to be various well known objects and creatures. Scooby and the gang have nothing on the Howlers. What’s October without some pumpkin craft? The Howlers enjoyed my least favorite bit of pumpkin carving as they pulled out all those icky innards. Never to waste anything they used the pumpkin remnants to create a delightful sensory experience by adding corn flour, glitter and food colouring. Sounds horrendous but they particularly loved looking for the googly eyes in their slime. What they did with the rest of the pumpkin was pop it in a blender, add some spices and flour and waited patiently for their pumpkin bread to rise. Unlike most of their cooking endeavours, the Howlers were very happy to eat this one. Every now and then we get a win in the cooking department.

Hot on the heels of our inset training, the natural, Reggio Emilia inspired resource table is an ongoing hit with Baboons as they find more and more new and creative ways to use the materials. This week they’ve been rolling conkers into containers and finding interesting ways of balancing oddly shaped materials on top of each other. You may have noticed the Baboons’ festive mantelpiece of mini-pumpkins, hand decorated with glitter and various materials the Baboons had to use scissors to cut. Irena, the Persona Doll, visited the Baboons this week to talk about a rather unfortunate experience she had during playtime when some children wouldn’t play with her because of the way she looked. The Baboons spent time talking about all of their differences and similarities and were very sad that people had been mean to Irena because she didn’t look like them. She got extra big squeezy cuddles this week from all the children and they showered her with compliments. This week’s cooking activity was cheesy, vegetable muffins and the Baboons enjoyed our brand new room cookware which included child-sized chopping boards, easier to hold graters, and measuring jugs. Spoiled you Baboons are. Absolutely spoiled.