Three Ingredient Puffy Paint

24 Mar 2018 56 Comments

by Ritu in Art, Children, Thoughts Opinions & Memories Tags: , , , , , , , ,

You know me, I’m a teacher, and an Early Years teacher at that.

This means a lot of hands-on sensory activities to develop and stimulate young minds, and lots of chances for me to experiment with great arts and crafts ideas I find on the interweb!

This week, we tried out Puffy Paint!

Puffy Paint

Literally, three ingredients!

  • PVA/white/school glue
  • White shaving foam
  • Food colouring

And some containers and old lolly sticks to stir.

  1. All you need to do is pour some glue in a pot and add approximately the equal amount of shaving foam to it. I used around 2 tablespoons of glue then squirted the shaving foam in.
  2. Use the lolly stick to fold these two ingredients together, as if folding sugar into egg whites. You don’t want to lose the air in the foam.
  3. Once at the required consistency, add a few drops of food colouring, and mix again.

And there you have it!

I made up 8 pots, including a white one, and the kids loved it!

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Puffy paintings looking Good! #eyfs #creative #art #puffypaint

A post shared by Ritu B (@ritubhathalwrites) on

You can use a brush to blob the paint on paper or card, then once completed, leave to dry, overnight preferably, to get a wonderfully textured finish that is soft and spongy to touch!

The children really enjoyed the different feel of the paint, and they were intrigued by my sample painting, with these foam-like areas that were soft to touch.

They are so excited to be able to take their works of art home after the weekend!

Explaining Storm Doris to The Kids!

23 Feb 2017 54 Comments

by Ritu in Children, Thoughts Opinions & Memories Tags: , , , , , , ,

If you live here in the UK you will have been bombarded by the multitude of weather warnings that have accompanied the latest storm to reach our shores from across the Atlantic.

Storm Doris!

We were warned of high-speed winds, some areas hitting over 90mph (we got around 60mph in our area) and high tides, 30cm of snow in the Scottish Highlands…

And sure enough, it was a pretty blustery day!

There was wind (a lot!), rain (brief but heavy!), cloud (all day) and blue skies too!

The wind blew all day, and as per government guidelines, we have to allow for indoor as well as outdoor play in nursery unless it is unsafe outside. Today was not unsafe, but dang cold in the wind! Nevertheless, as kids are, they wanted to run around like loonies in the gales!

Who am I to stop them?

My colleague and I wrapped ourselves and the kids up, and let them go crazy, as we stood there, rooted to the spot unless a rather strong gust of wind uprooted us!

Sitting in my classroom every morning, we talk about the day and the weather. They all commented on the wind, and I mentioned that we were welcoming a guest for the day, Storm Doris.

Doris is a very old lady. It’s her birthday today. She is 1,000,000 years old! A million candles take a long time to blow out, so she will be huffing and puffing the whole day long!

Some of them asked to see her, but I said she was too far away, high up in the sky, like the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk (our focus story this week!) but that we could still feel her blow!

So I apologise in advance to the parents of my students, who might be babbling on about Old Lady Doris, and her candles! That is what happens when my imagination comes into play at nursery!

 

 

This Week in Nursery

20 Jan 2017 29 Comments

by Ritu in Thoughts Opinions & Memories Tags: , , , , , ,

It’s been another fun week, where we have been learning about traditional nursery rhymes!

Here are some displays from the work we have been doing with the kids!

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the Kings horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again!

We made papier mache Humpties as a class and the children also made their own ones, 2D, sat on a wall!

The Grand Old Duke Of York

Oh the Grand Old Duke Of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top pf the hill
and he marched them down again
And when they were up they were up
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up
They were neither up nor down

We sang the rhyme, and marched in a circle. Some children also used drums to beat to the tune. Then we made soldiers to reinforce the shapes we had been learning, Square, rectangle and circle.

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Below the display, you can see sounds which the children have been learning. The baskets in front held objects which start with each sound. A great exploratory way for them to understand about initial sounds!

Jack and Jill

jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after
Up Jack got and home did trot
As fast as he could caper
He went to bed to mend his head
With vinegar and brown paper

We drew around a boy and a girl and then used collage and paint to create a Jack and a Jill! These were used on our display. Then we sang the rhyme, many times, and acted it out using a well we constructed, complete with pulley, so they could fetch their own water! and a ‘hill’ for them to walk up, and fall down! The picture may not make sense it was very effective, and the children loved it!

And that doesn’t include the tray finger painting! Messy but again, lots of fun!

It’s been a busy creative week, but I love making these displays for the children to enjoy their work!

Snow Fun! (It Didn’t Last Long Though!)

13 Jan 2017 42 Comments

by Ritu in Family, Thoughts Opinions & Memories Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Well, you know how excited I was yesterday, about the snow fall that we had.

It was cold. We got around 3 cm.. not much, but enough for the kids to want to go wild out there! (Well, as wild as 3cm lets you get!)

Initially, I was like, “No kids, you need to get to bed. We’ll see tomorrow.” But then I got to thinking. I was fully aware that the snow was not due to continue falling overnight, but the temperatures were going to be low. This meant that whatever snow we had would still be there, but in ice form, rather than lovely soft snow.

So I crumbled, and all four of us got wrapped u, ready to go and ‘play’ in the snow!

It would have been five, but Sonu went out and ran straight back in. Strangely, he doesn’t like cold, wet things falling on his fur!

And they attempted to make snow angels, snow balls and snowmen!

It meant that the pristine, snow-covered garden was now a mushy mess, but at least they had fun!

This morning, it was indeed icy. I needed a pickaxe to get through the ‘snow’ on the windscreen, and the road, in places, where the area was mostly residential, was treacherous. There were ice rinks where puddles once were!

Getting to school was no better. The carpark was a giant lawsuit waiting to happen, with iced-over surfaces! The caretaker was trying his hardest to salt and grit over the playgrounds before the children arrived, and there were three of them for him to deal with! One is on an incline, and the main path is at the bottom of the slope. As he scraped the path, the ice from the top of the playground was melting, and rolling down slowly, refreezing where he was trying to clear!

Poor guy!

It was almost a pointless exercise!

Morning play outside for the whole school was cancelled as all three playgrounds were far too dangerous, except in our nursery. We were lucky! Our little area still had some ice snow for the kids to enjoy, and clear paths for them to move around!

It was a joy to see these children, some of whom hadn’t even been allowed to touch the snow, play in this wonderful cold stuff that they hadn’t ever experienced before! (Unless they were from Poland, in which case they had seen much, much more!)

And we even made a snowman!!!!

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Alas… it’s all gone now!!!

Another Week In Nursery!

06 Jan 2017 53 Comments

by Ritu in Children, Humour, Thoughts Opinions & Memories Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s been a while since I posted about my dear class.

Honestly, they are a wonderful bunch!

Trouble-free? I didn’t say that, but if that were the case, it would be boring!

Take today, for instance. We usually put a little activity out for the kids to ‘fiddle’ with, when they arrive. This morning I had stickle bricks out (remember them?) and when the children have created things, we always ask them to tell us what they made. Usually, they are just towers of blocks, and the child will tell you it’s a car/house/rocket/mummy. But their imagination and creativity is growing, and we are getting recognisable objects… sometimes…

Check out this wonderful piece…

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It’s a Dog-Rocket, of course! What did you think it was?

And in other news, we have had a winter fuelled week, making ‘icicles’ and ‘snowmen’, and talking about the weather.

It’s a crying shame that these children are not old enough to have actually seen snow here in the UK, being only 3-4 years old. So I did a bit of research on good old Pinterest, and found out how to make realistic play snow, that was even cold to the touch, and mouldable too!

Bicarb of soda (Baking soda for you Americans!) and white hair conditioner. It worked a treat, but you needed a lot of Bicarb. So I found a second recipe using corn flour and shaving foam too.

The bicarb one really was cold, but there wasn’t a huge amount.

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Still, the kids loved it! Though the cleaner probably cursed me, as there was powdery white stuff everywhere!!!!

And this inspired me to create a new display too!

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Those are our ‘icicles’ hanging from the top, and I even wrote a poem!

Frost and icicles and snow!
Winter weather’s here you know!

A great big snowman we will build
Until our hands feel cold and chilled

Then we’ll come and warm our hands
We love winter with our friends!

Whether they appreciate it or not, I think it looks pretty! And the children always love to look for photos of themselves!

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I was especially impressed with my Olaf! Who doesn’t love him? The best thing was when I originally put Olaf on the wall. There was nothing else to look at, but him. It intrigued the children, who were eager to see what all this was about. But the best scene was when I came inside from the playground to find four little girls like this…

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They were ‘watching’Olaf like a film!!!!

Oh to be a child again, eh!

More from Nursery-Land another time!

 

 

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