SAND AND WATER TABLES: SENSORY APPARATUS PART III

SAND AND WATER TABLES: SENSORY APPARATUS PART III
I'd love to try this! Thanks to Tom for a great blog.

Hello, welcome to the Woodcroft blog.

Finally, after reading lots of other school and early years blogs and itching to write my own, I seem to have managed to get this blog up and running with the invaluable support from one of our expert governors, without whose help I couldn't have done it, so thank you so much Hannah! I aim to blog about once a month. I will write about an aspect of a typical day at Woodcroft and will also write about special events as they occur.

So to tell you a little bit about us...

Woodcroft Nursery School is a stand alone maintained school, one of two in the local area we are the only two in the whole of Essex. We have three rooms of 52 children each [each child has 15 hours split into five sessions which can be accessed in a pattern to suit the needs of parents and children] and each room has a qualified teacher, nursery nurse and special needs support assistant so we really lucky. We operate a free flow system where the children can access two of the rooms and the garden during the main session and then each room has their own group and snack time. We also have a rolling snack available during free flow.

We are very lucky to have a team of dedicated staff who are passionate about providing the best possible care and education for these young children. We are always looking to improve our practice and look forward which is why I think these blogs are so useful as professionals get to see what lovely ideas are going on elsewhere and also share some of their own.

We need a bigger hole!

Well it's been a busy first week back and after home visits and our older children returning on tueday some of our new children started today. As is often the case we had a few children anxious about staying without Mummy or Daddy so we had ready, the trusty marble run, made by a lovely parent years ago, well before I started here seven years ago. This simple object never fails to calm and capture a child's focus. There is something hypnotic and reassuring about the repetetive action of putting the marbles into the top and watching them make their zig-zagging way down before catching them with a satisfying plop in a small tub and starting all over again.

As a small group of children were engaged with this, one child put a large marble down. It's always interesting to see what happens next so I always leave the big marbles in the tin. The children were mainly concerned that their marbles couldn't go down and the child who had put the big marble down just put another and another. I sat back and watched. A child who had been watching piped up 'We need a bigger hole'. This was a child who had just started with us, already thinking creatively and problem solving. 'I think I might know where we can find a bigger hole' I said and went and found the long box we use for shooting cars down [an idea from Sand and Water Tables blog so thanks for that]. Eventually the children will think like this for themselves but in these early days we scaffold their play a little bit more. Then of course the cars came out and all sorts of other things were tried out down the shute. Lots of exclamations of 'yes' 'we did it' and 'this is fun', 'oh no, it didn't go down' were overheard many times.

The shute inspired by Sand and Water Tables blog

With the trusty marble run