The children have shown a great interest in dragons recently (it is often a feature of their outdoor role-play as they pretend the steam coming from the boiler vent is dragon breath) & so I thought it was about time we had some in the classroom. I decided to link it to castles as so many of the story books with dragons in feature them. Here are some of the things we got up to… .
I found these vintage scales in a charity shop & couldn’t resist buying them for school as another opportunity for the children to explore. We only have plastic balances & scales & so it is a new experience for them. We pretended it was the castle kitchen & the stones, nuggets, wooden chips & gold pebbles were food. Some children enjoyed having a go at balancing the ‘food’ with the weights but, of course, it wasn’t long before everything was mixed together. The concept of ‘balancing with the weight’ correctly has not quite been achieved for all of the children, but there was some lovely use of the vocabularly ‘lighter’, ‘heavier’ etc. .
Fine Motor Transient ‘Art’
Barely a week goes by when we don’t have some kind of transient art activity. I do like to change the nature of it, though. This week I thought we’d have a bit of a metal & silver theme to it as I decided that it would link castles & ‘armour’. There are lots of examples of this on Pinterest, which have inspired me greatly – but I especially liked this shared by Sally at Fairy Dust Teaching. I already had these silver coloured dishes & it was easy to lay my hands on silver/grey loose parts such as washers, screws & nuggets. I drew silver lines on black card for them to ‘trace’ with the loose parts. A simple & effective way for them to use their fine motor skills & encourage focus & concentration. This is not, strictly speaking, transient ‘art’ as the design is provided for the children, but they were free to turn over the card & create their own patterns if they wished (nobody did)… .
Small bricks, blocks, glass nuggets & chess pieces for castle building… of course they build whatever they choose… .
Two activities on here this week – the ‘crown’ decorating is self explanatory, but we also had a ‘Beat the Timer’ game, where the children see how many ‘swords’ (matchsticks) they can thread through the holes in the flour shakers before the sand runs out… .
Dragons in the Small World Area
Dragons, knights & a ‘castle’. They really loved this & the dragons have had great adventures… .
‘Jewels’ from the castle for pattern making…
… and other creatures. I provided googly eyes, feathers, matchsticks, stones & brown play dough for the children to make dragons & whatever else they wanted. As well as dragons, there have been buzzy bees, monsters, people & a Minion! .
Metal goblets, dishes etc were added to to the table for a, sort of, medieval banquet… I added natural materials to represent the food so as not to limit their play. They loved it! I’m not sure if Yorkshire pud, sausages, mash & gravy was on the menu in those days, but that’s what I was served! 😉 .
Independently, the children chose to create castles in the construction area. Three girls made these with reels & ‘jewels’ from the light box… This one was a collaboration of a few children, both boys & girls. Figures from the small world also made their way onto it… .
The children loved making potions with the buttons & test tubes on the light box last week, so I simply added a variety of bottles to the water tray for them to continue… .There is still a huge interest in these activities, so expect an adapted continuation of this next week…
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– Rachel (“,)