At The Court House, the Baby Room participates in morning group time in which we sing ‘hello’ to everyone. We also look at the day of the week and the weather. The babies love the weather element so much that we decided to base our play around this.
We started the morning singing “What’s the Weather Like Today?” where the children use the correlating actions as they sing along. We then looked at the weather from the window and asked the children questions to prompt ideas of what they think the weather is such as “are the trees dancing? Perhaps the wind is blowing the leaves!”. The children enjoy the responsibility of finding the correct flash card and sticking it to the board to show their peers.
After this, we created some beautiful artwork of clouds using cotton wool and glitter glue. This activity promoted the use of fine motor skill development, as we used a pincer grip and palmar grasp to manipulate the wool onto our page. We spoke about the glitter flecks looking like rain and how it had been a bit wet outside as the window had raindrops and that the cotton wool was soft like the fluffy clouds.
As well as our crafts, the children explored instruments to sing songs (‘Rain, Rain Go Away’, ‘I Can See a Rainbow’ and ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ etc) as well as our tuff tray with the weather flash cards to explore freely with matching colours and objects to make links.
To finish the day off, we made rain shakers! We laid out a variety of dried objects that created sounds and got the children to do some scooping and measuring to pour into a toilet roll tube with a base. After we sealed this, the children used paint dabblers to design their card to wrap around the tube ready to shake. We spoke about the sounds that we could hear and how it replicates the ‘pitter patter’ sound we hear from raindrops – making links to our ‘playing with sounds’ part of the curriculum.
The children had such a fun filled day and we carried this on into the week as we took a wet walk to Redcatch Park to look at the changes, growth, and decay of our environment with the weather in mind.
The Big Bird Watch