By Pumpkin Light!

We had great fun going along to our local National Trust property for a pumpkin carving event. We got to choose our pumpkins, then scoop the flesh out before carrying them to the barn to carve! The one above is Eve's face - she wasn't too keen on carving as she had one eye on the craft table next to us with coloured pumpkin seeds to make pictures with and soon disappeared to make some!

Faith LOVED carving her pumpkin - so much so that she carved four faces on hers. I was slightly concerned about letting her loose with the little knife they provided, but she handled it really well and really enjoyed herself!

I couldn't resist having a go and made this little cat on the back of Eve's pumpkin! I was surprised by how easy they were to carve as last year Dewi really struggled to carve our pumpkin, but these were really thin-skinned so much easier!





 Here is Faith scooping out her pumpkin seeds!

Here Eve is checking the fit of her pumpkin lid - the man helping cut a wedge out of the lid to act as a chimney and stop the lid from shrinking too quickly once the candle was lit -  a great tip we didn't know about and had problems with last year!!

Here is my four year old wielding that pumpkin knife! She was very skilled with it!

We ate homemade wholewheat pizza's by pumpkin light that evening - it was such fun and of course we've lit them every evening since!





Friday's Favourite's!

Well it's Friday again and it's been another busy, happy week that has flown by. I love watching the children and seeing their little mile stones, this week one of my little ones learned how to clamber up the metal bars of the climbing frame to go down the slide all by herself.... a real WOW moment for her!!

• These garden play mats look so lovely.... how about a bit of old mac underneath them and turn them into picnic mats that roll up really small?
• This new website is building up some wonderful resources - have a cruise round their site and see..... they'll even print it for you if your printer is out of action!!!!

OK so this post didn't make it onto the blog for Friday, it has been one of those weekends, but there has been plenty going on behind the scenes, look out for posts on Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican festival chalked in for Wednesday, group plans for Child Safety Week in June, and some water activities!

Chinese New Year

I am planning to spend two weeks enjoying all things Chinese for the second half of February! Here is my planning linked to the EYFS although many of the activities cover more than one area!

KUW

• Trip to a Chinese Supermarket in Birmingham to buy snacks, cooking utensils and decorations with the children. In the Chinese Quarter so should be nicely decorated for New Year - Risk Assess.
• Fly bio-degradeable Chinese sky lanterns in the early evening as it gets dark - available from poundshops - Risk Assess due to use of fire!
• Look at and talk about pictures of Chinese children in our Children of the world book - no link for this as it's a library cast-off (cost 20p and it's a huge hardback book with the most beautiful images in!)
• make Chinese rice-pudding

CD

• Make Chinese lanterns from paper.
• Make paper dragon puppets.
• Sensory play with cooked and raw noodles.
• Make a plum blossom tree.

PD

• Dragon dancing.
• Make New Year Dumplings - this recipe will call for rolling the dough into a big sausage, cutting it into rounds, rolling the rounds out into circles, spooning the filling then pinching the dumplings closed.  These are all skills that one or more of the childrena re interested in recently, and they are steamed so healthy too!  The recipe linked above tells sbout the symbolism of the dumpling!
• Playing with dried rice, spooning pouring etc.

CLL

• Spinning books for zodiac signs and Mandarin numbers.
• Traditional slat book made from peices of wood bound together, decoupage the slats with Chinese letters and symbols/pictures.
• Story of Chinese New Year.
• Count Your Way Through China.
• Lanterns and Firecrackers.
• We love Chinese New Year from the library.
• Memory book - I have used all of the above books to collect ideas to put in a memory book for the Continent draws, including a money envelope with chinese currency cut and pasted into word, printed then cut out.

PSRN

• Chinese bank notes (see above) for role play purchases!
• Mandarin numbers printed out, make matching games, link to English numbers, play snap etc.
• Tangram puzzles.
• Ordinal numbers using the order that the zodiac animals come in.

PSED

• Chinese dress ordered from e-bay.
• felt dumplings, felt fortune cookies, woollen noodles for role play.
• Sharing party food.
• Talking about experiences.
• Zodiac bookmarks to take home to parents.

As usual, I will be using these as resources to do with the children as and when they fit in with their interests and how the day is going.  I'm really looking forwards to the supermarket trip!!

Australia Day

I only heard about Australia day from the Childminding help forum a week or so ago and thought that it sounded fun and I found so many great ideas that I'm 'doing' Australia for the whole week!  here is what I have planned:

• Aboriginal Dot Art, I have got packets of stickers from Wilko's and have cut squares of baking parchment to make them on.... this will be a new skill with the little ones, and an old favourite for the older ones!
• Petroglyphs, but instead of spraying water then sprinkling powder paint, I'm putting liquid paint in a little spraybottle, I'm doing them onto sheets of fine sandpaper to look like cave walls!
• Didgeridoos from loo rolls taped together instead of the long tubes.
• Australian map collage with cut outs to glue on of things like koala, kangaroo, people etc.
• As usual we will put together a memory book of the week's fun for the children to enjoy talking about, we will use some colouring pages to make a map and flag for the book.
• Cook Damper Dogs and fruit kabobs to eat.
• Australia - A True Book
• An Australian abc of animals, this is such a lovely book with the animals painted in aboriginal style.

I'm really looking forwards to some fun next week.... I've planned it on a spider gram showing the links to all areas of the EYFS as these activities extend things that we have explored recently and introduce some new skills too. We keep our memory books in continent draws.... Ill post about hose another time!!!