F1 - Mark Making

Gross motor mark making activities are great fun and a brilliant way to encourage early mark making skills. There are many stages a child needs to be able to accomplish before the skill of writing can begin; this starts with gross motor movements.
In nursery this week, lots of washing up bottles were filled with coloured water and large paintbrushes were dipped in water in the water trolley.
Children made marks which they talked about; Mykala traced lines that she found on the playground floor and Annalise and her friends wrote their names. They did squirt each other a little bit too, but it was just too tempting!

This week in our Merida chatterbox, there were some very exciting clues to the story we were reading. There was a cow, some beans, a mummy figure, a boy called Jack and a clue that we had to find outside - it was some giant feet coming out of the clouds in the sky! Have you guessed what it is? Yes, it’s Jack and the Beanstalk. Mrs Fenton and her friends painted boxes to make the Giant’s castle so that we could act out the story. The children were really confident in their ability to re-tell the story and they were able to sequence the pictures and talk about what was happening in each picture. There were lots of Giant voices heard in the continuous provision area shouting, ‘Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!’ Alaina was particularly fierce!
We are carrying on with this theme this week and in our Tree-mendous Tuesday adventure there were lots of giants shouting about eating other children! Be careful if you’re in the woods this week!

We made medals in our final Forest School adventure with Alice and Jane and the morning children had to cross the stream carefully standing on the stepping stones, which was huge fun. The children also climbed on every tree stump and log they encountered and Freya found a beetle that she decided to pick up and befriend, as she giggled and told her friends it was tickling her!