The Fairfield babies have been enjoying exploring Christmas using all their senses, we have been singing lots of Christmas songs and exploring bells and chimes with the musical instruments. Our older babies have been using their fine motor skills when decorating the Christmas tree. We have been hearing lots of new single words as the babies read the Christmas books with their key worker. When getting messy, the babies have been watching the marks made when they roll baubles through the paint on the floor, creating beautiful Christmas pictures to be displayed.
The toddlers have been exploring Christmas through colours. We have been exploring the paint, experimenting mixing the different colours and making links between our environment “white like snow outside” the children said as they painted with blue and white, practising their fine motor movements and doing simple shapes such as circle and lines when creating our winter wonderland pictures. We made some Christmas tree decorations, threading through holes using pipe cleaners and using the pincer grasp we are learning when picking up the different items to decorate our tree with.
The preschool have been creating lots of beautiful festive decorations, we have used our increasing skills when using scissors to cut out strips of colourful card to make a Christmas tree. To create our tree we had lots of observations to take in to consideration, what colour would we use for our tree? How long would we need to make our biggest strip? How will we know it’s a tree? The children discussed their own Christmas trees at home, and ones they have seen in the community. We then made our own Christmas tree in a Forest school session with Chloe, we used what we already know “Christmas trees are big at the top and small at the bottom” and went on a twig hunt around the garden. We problem solved when choosing how we would attach our decoration together, we decided string would be best and we worked together to tie the knots. The children used their knowledge of trial an error when adding the baubles, putting equal amounts on each side so that it balances.
