The extremely wet weather has inspired Preschool to explore and engage in wonderfully wet activities!
We have started the week reflecting on our ‘Take One Picture’ activities where the painting ‘The Finding of Moses’ by Orzio Gentileschi has instigated discussions and helped us plan activities linking to this.
Having spoken to the children about the finding of Moses and how he was put in a basket and into the river to keep him safe, we recreated the river in our sandpit. It resulted in some fantastic engagement from the children. They considered how we would keep the water in the river using foil and we made a small basket with Moses in it to send down the river. This physical reenactment of the story encouraged a lot of excitement from the children. So much so that we then decided to take the children to a real ‘river’.
We took the children to a nearby stream, they threw some sticks into the water and we watched to see how fast they moved. We had some races with the sticks and the children were talking about how quickly the sticks moved. Mrs Mackay noticed that a stone in the stream wasn’t moving, and that created conversations about why the stone didn't move but the sticks did. We also linked this back to Moses in his basket and how he moved along the river.
We had lots of other wet play fun this week, such as learning about sinking and floating in our water tray. The children gathered objects from around the room, then estimated whether the items would sink or float. We then tried them to test if we were correct. Some items surprised us, and it was a great opportunity to talk about why we had the results we did and it fed back to our conversations at the river with the sticks and the stone.
The children have also enjoyed channeling water, using drain pipes and containers. Filling and emptying the trays and watching the water flow down channels. Activities like this create opportunities for physical development as well as encouraging lots of Mathematical language including volume, less, more, full and empty.
What a wet week we’ve had but it has been so much fun!