Autumn

I love autumn for all it's beautiful colours, the fun of woodland walks, as the children discover the delights of the changing season, bringing home leaves, acorns, conkers etc.

Our autumn sensory tub

These are just a few of our favourite autumn books, I love sharing  Gerda Muller's season board books with the children. They are beautifully illustrated and always stimulate lots of talk about what they can see and what they themselves have done.

We also had great fun marbling leaves using shaving  foam and paint, this is the second year we have done this craft and we loved the results.

We covered a tray in shaving foam, spreading it out smoothly.

We then chose some autumn coloured paint and dribbled it over the sahving foam.

We then dragged a stick gently through the foam until we got the desired effect.

Then gently press the cardboard leaf shapes down into the foam.

Then very gently we scraped the extra foam / paint of with a piece of paper.

We made some clay hedgehogs, well most of us made hedgehogs, one little person wanted to make a spider.

We also made some animal ginger bread biscuits and decorated them

We also used corks to print autumn leaves on our trees.

Even my older babies / young toddlers, ages approximately 9 months to 18 months, are able to join in and enjoy playing with the shaving foam, They are able to pick up the cork and with a little help to start with, able to do some printing.

Pop Art

Not the sort of pop art you maybe thinking of, my Mum gave me a while ago a load of party popper, which have sat in the back of the cupboard waiting for inspiration to hit. Well it hit during the summer holidays and thanks to a large sheet of sticky back plastic my lot had great fun creating some art. It was great activity for all ages but for the littleones it's fantastic because they can easily stick anything to it

 

and yes when you fire a party popper at sticky back plastic it does stay there! This stayed up on my patio door for a couple of weeks and the babies loved to keep coming back to it and moving bits around. This will definitely be an activity that I will use with the little ones again and again as they can have all the fun of sticking without having to worry about gluing the pieces first because at this young age they would need someone to remind them and help to put the glue down first, this way they can have all the fun of creating before they reach the stage of co-ordinating their gluing and sticking.

Home Made Pavement Paint

We love art and craft activities and we love being outside so this is a brilliant combination of both things that we love doing. You need some cornflour, water and food colouring, I have a lovely selection of the paste food colouring, which are brilliant for this and lots of varied coloured play dough.

Mix 1 part cornflour to 1 part water, add more cornflour if it is too runny, add in the food colouring and go and paint.

 I have a very pretty patio know as you can tell.

Dinosaurs

So last summer we had a mini dinosaur theme, as I had mainly older children who love dinosaurs to say the least. Now I had been thinking of adding some more detailed planning too it, to create a full theme with EYFS planning too and now I've got round to it.

I set up our tuff spot with our dinosaurs, wooden blocks, some straw, oats etc for the children to explore and create their own adventure/scenes.

It wasn't long before they rearranged and created some new dinosaur homes.

Having enjoyed Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs, I decided to set up a dinosaur hunt with a difference, as each of the dinosaurs was busy doing something, like reading a book!

Building sandcastles.

Taking a trip on a raft.

Exploring the ball pit.

Climbing trees.

 Bouncing on the trampoline.

Relaxing on a swing.

Deciding whether to try out the slide

                       

and taking notes on the whole exercise!

                           

On another time I hid loads of pictures of different dinosaurs. The children had to find them, then match them up with our toy ones, then try and decide how they would move and see if they could move like them.

We then mad some bread, the children love to knead out the dough.

We then attempted to shape them into dinosaurs, fossils or dinosaur footprints.

Words from a couple of songs we used

Mr Dinosaur

Mr Dinosaur, Mr Dinosaur

Wave your tail, give a roar.

Stomp your feet on the ground.

Such a loud and rumbly sound.

Mr Dinosaur, give a roar.

Mr Dinosaur, Mr Dinosaur

Wave your tail, give a roar.

When you give your tail a shake

You could cause a big earthquake.

Mr Dinosaur, give a roar.

and this one sort of sang to If You're Happy and You Know It

There are dinosaurs stomping, all around.

There are dinosaurs stomping, all around.

There are dinosaurs all around stomping on the ground.

There are dinosaurs stomping, all around.

There are dinosaurs flying all around.

There are dinosaurs swimming all around

There are dinosaurs eating all around.