We hope you all had a wonderful Valentines Day. Wether you spent the day with a special partner, family member or your children, we hope it was a day full of love and kindness. The children enjoyed celebrating the day, being able to tell people they love them and also feeling the love from all the practitioners too. A wonderful day! There has been lots of other fun things happening this week too. We have been learning about Hippo’s for World Hippo Day. And we have also been celebrating ourselves and who we would like to be and, which qualities we like about ourselves. A WEEK OF LOVE.

Today has been full of love and kindness and so many activities themed around Valentine’s Day.
In the baby room, the babies have enjoyed making their own Valentine’s Day cards for their mummy’s and daddy’s!. They dipped a heart shaped marshmallow into some red paint and stamped it onto the front of their cards!. 👶❤️
The Babies have also enjoyed exploring rose petals in the messy tray!. They used their fingers and hands to feel the petals and throw them in the air! They had lots and lots of fun playing together!. 👶🌹❤️
Babies also enjoyed eating their heart shaped toast. They liked the tasty jam on their toast. 👶🍞🍓
In the small world area the children enjoyed being creative with play dough. With the play dough they made hearts using heart shape templates to mould around. Then the children added gems to their hearts. 👦👧❤️
In the messy room the children had painting love heart activity. We used a cardboard tube and shaped it in to a shape of a heart. The children then dipped it in to red paint and then printed it on to paper. 👦👧❤️📄🎨
In the tray we had red jelly and different sweets. We also added washing up liquid to make a bubbly. The children enjoyed picking out the sweets and pointing out the heart shaped one. 👦👧❤️🍫🍭🍬
In maths area the children enjoyed playing our matching number games. Each picture had numbers and the children had to match the heart number balloons to the spots on the picture. The children counted the spots and then placed the heart number balloon on top. They did really well at this activity. 👦👧🔢🎈
At snack time we had heart shaped toast with a choice of strawberry jam or butter. The children were wowed but their heart shaped toast and ate it all up. 👦👧❤️🍞🍓
In our sensory themed tuff tray they children enjoyed making a carnation for their loved ones. They told us they were for their mummy’s, daddy’s, brothers or sisters and nanny and grandads. They used red and pink tissue paper, pipe cleaners and a grown ups to help them with the tricky bits. 👦👧👩🌹

HungryMoos sent over a valentines card so our toddlers enjoyed sitting at the table colouring it in. They used different colour crayons and pencils and focused for a long amount of time. 👦👧✏️🖍❤️💌
At lunch time we had a very tasty treat of heart shaped cookies. They were very tasty and the children ate them all up. 👧👦❤️😋🍪

Potion zone!🧪Our scientists gathered around the big tray to make their very own fruit potion using the resources scattered around the tray which were salt, bananas, blueberries, paint, sequins and feathers. The children worked together to mix up all the ingredients before making one big potion. 🧑🏻‍🔬👨🏼‍🔬

Aliens love underpants!👽🩲The children gathered round the tuff tray to make their own funky aliens out of play dough, using pipe cleaners and googly eyes to give the aliens facial expressions. Once the aliens were created, each child set to work at decorating a pair of underpants for the aliens to wear.

Feel the love❤️ Our artists set to work at making their own Valentine’s Day cards choosing from sequins, paint, crayons, pencils, feathers and love hearts to decorate them before practicing their writing skills inside the card!✍🏼

What can you feel? Many of our children have enjoyed exploring the sensory bags today over in the messy tray. Using their hands, each child took it in turns to go round each bag and feel what was inside.👋🏻

Over in the messy tray we had some pink slime! This was covered in different size love hearts 💕and the coloured red. With this we got to feel the textures and see what it smelt like as well as playing alongside all our friends.

Team work play dough! At the tuff tray we all stood around and listened 👂to the steps we needed to follow to make some great pink 🌸 play dough. Everytime it was our go we was asked “how much”, this got us thinking on how many scoops or how much to pour to add the ingredients.

Afterwards we used different tools 🛠️ to make great things. We had butterflies 🦋, cakes 🧁 and hearts ❤️. We even made a gingerbread man which led us to read the gingerbread man story. 📚

Where does love come from? Today we have been speaking about the country France and its capital Paris! We used the building blocks to build our own version of the Eiffel tower.🌎 As well as discussing how much we love our families and all our friends!❤️

Today in babies 👶 we have had a great day celebrating 🥳 national hippo 🦛 day! 

We started off by making lots of different marks on a big picture of a hippo 🦛 using different coloured crayons 🖍 and chalk. We made blue 🔵 and red 🔴 lines across the hippos 🦛 body, we also tried to copy the practitioner naming the colours. 

After this we sat at the table to decorate our very own hippo 🦛 using grey paint 🎨 on a paintbrush 🖌 moving it in different ways. We then with a bit of help sprinkled some glitter ✨ over our hippos 🦛 choosing either blue or silver glitter ✨. 

We then loved playing with some new toys 🧸 that was brought in by one of our parents. There were books 📚, pop up animal toys, teddies- including a big pink pig 🐷, a pink bear 🐻 and a big grey lamb 🐑. The babies 👶 cuddled the teddies excitedly!

Happy National Hippo Day!🦛 The toddlers have had lots of fun today. 🤩

In the creative room, they have been doing lots of counting 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ in the hippo 🦛 themed tuff tray. They have been counting how many hippos 🦛they could see 👀down in the jungle 🌴🌳 by the water hole. 💦

The toddlers have also been colouring in a picture 🖼of a hippo 🦛 using some pencils. ✏️They have been creating lots of different marks ➿〰 on their pictures 🖼as they worked in their gross 💪and fine ✋motor skills, as well as their pencil grip. ✍️

The toddler have also been on the hunt 🕵🏻 for some hidden alphabets 

🔤in the sand 🏝. The toddlers used the sand sieves and their hands ✋ to dig through the sand. 🏝Each time they found a letter 🔤the toddlers and the practitioners talked 🗣 about what letters they had found! 🔤

Preschool had lots of fun today taking part in national Hippo day🦛

We learnt lots of new exciting facts about safari animals and got creative too! 😊🖌

To start off the day we went into the role play room and made our own safari, there was lots & lots of small world animals to chose from🐆🦓🦏🐊 we had a big discussion to talk about all the different animals we had and which ones were our favourites😃

We also had the opportunity to draw our own hippos🦛 we used photos we had of hippos and used the crayons and pencils to draw the best Hippos we had ever seen😁

In the construction room we got messy and got stuck in to decorating our own very big hippo🦛😆We started off by mixing the paint 🎨 to make the right colours for the hippo and then got creative in using our fingers & hands to paint! 

This afternoon we read the Three Billy goats Gruff🐐🐐🐐we all sat down together and discussed what happened in the story! We then went into the creative room to build our very own bridges for the goats🐐we worked together as a team🤗 to build the strong bridge so that the troll 🧌 doesn’t get the Three goats🐐