Tuff Tray Challenge.

Another week of fabulous tuff trays, it gets harder and harder to choose each week! We have been busy voting for our favourite one, who will be this weeks winners? Winklebury created a friendship bracelet station using cereal for ‘National Cereal Day.’ Highdown took a trip to space with their rocket inspired tuff tray and Worthing explored a favourite Disney film ‘UP!’ A week of fabulous invitations to play.

WINKLEBURY- MAKE A FRIENDSHIP BRACELET FOR YOUR FRIEND.

INTENT: This weeks tray is was based on the national Cereal day and I decided to combine march’s month of craft by creating a tray where the children could explore the different ways we could use cereal. I also decided to do this tray as part of the children’s interest as the children love cereal as a part of their sensory play as well as eating cereal for breakfast!.

IMPLEMENT: For this tray I decided to use Cheerios because not only is it a great breakfast cereal but it can open lots of opportunities for arts and craft play. The activity I chose was friendship bracelet making From the bracelet making I wanted to focus on fine motor skills especially with the bigger children who will be off to school soon this activity would be a great activity for them to practise that important skill. I had also to make this decision asked some of the children what they would like to do with the cheerios and that is what they came up with!

IMPACT: The children really enjoyed this adult led activity!. They had conversations about who their friendship bracelets were for and why- one child told their friend that they were making a bracelet for them because they loved them! All of the children enjoyed sitting down, concentrating on an activity and most importantly enjoying secretly eating the cheerio’s!.

HIGHDOWN- BLAST OFF!

INTENT: This week we have celebrated national cereal day in style by creating our own ‘UP’ themed construction tray based on the film! The intent of this activity is to enhance the children’s imagination through the use of construction toys and through exploration of different textures. This will promote the children’s independence as they will make their own decisions with how they are going to use each resource such as building blocks, diggers, and cereal.

IMPLEMENT: In the outer parts of the tray I have included a range of different cereals to create an opportunity for the children to develop their sensual exploration. I then added a variety of different sized building blocks and diggers on top of the cereal to create a construction experience. In the centre of the tray I added green rice and a house with colourful balloons to re-create the image from the film. This will also promote the children’s ability to name each colour.

IMPACT: The children loved doing this activity and they were extremely excited to play with the balloons on the house! After spending some time exploring the balloons the children then decided that they wanted to play with the cereal. At first they were excited to repeatedly lift and drop the cereal into the tray before then initiating a tased test! This promoted their communication skills as this initiated a conversation about what the cereal felt like, tasted like and smelt like. Once the children had done this they enjoyed scooping and pouring the cereal with the diggers as well as using the blocks to build tall towers.