Autumn Days

We love Autumn at Ladybirds – the change in the season provides so many opportunities to notice differences in our environment and enjoy different celebrations with our families!

Leaves, Leaves, Leaves!

We are so lucky to have lots of lovely trees next to our top garden.  During the autumn months the leaves fall down and give us a wonderful natural resource for exploring and playing!  The children help us to sweep the leaves so the astroturf does not get slippy.  Using small brooms, brushes and dustpans they help do this job as part of our preschool community, but they are also brilliant exercises for our hand and wrist muscles – helping develop those fine motor movements we need for skills like writing!

The leaves and twigs are often used then in our small world play, creating environments for our dinosaurs, cars and bugs! Lots of the real minibeasts are hiding away in the cold weather, but we can always have fun tracking down our toy minibeasts hiding in the leaves!   Using the magnifying glasses, binoculars and our digital camera it’s a wonderful season for outdoor explorers!

We can also use these resources in our creative work too!  Twigs and leaves are great for painting and printing, creating lots of lovely marks and textures.  All the colour changes are great for inspiration when painting too – browns, oranges and yellows “look like all the falling leaves”

Fireworks, fireworks!

We all get very excited about firework night, all the colours and sounds create a wonderful sensory experience to talk about “they go bang and fizzle” “they sound so loud!” “it go wheeeeeeeeeee boom!” 

Write dancing is a perfect place to use our whole bodies to move like fireworks, whooshing, whizzing and jumping, we made some great firework shapes using the colours of our ‘whooshies’ to zoom across the sky!  Then, taking crayons and chalks, we used these big gross motor movements to make marks on paper – straight lines fro rockets, circles for Catherine wheels and swirls and arcs for falling sparkles.  Looking at our drawings the children decided more sparkle was needed so they moved their pictures to the blue area and got stuck in with some glue and glitter!   This was a lovely example of how the children lead their play through their environment at Ladybirds, choosing resources and following their ideas.

With firework night comes lots of talk about bonfires too and how important it is to keep safe near fire.   Using the firefighter role play resources the children built ‘fires’ in the top garden using bright orange and red fabrics, and then called 999 so the firefighters could arrive with their hose and extinguishers to put out the fire. “Calm down, calm down, the fire engine is here!” “We need water, put the hose on the fire”  “I got a extinguisher…shhhhhhhhhh” “The fire is out, hooray!”

“Can I come in your fire truck” “Yes, come on, be a fireman!”   “We going to another fire now, it’s over there – come on!”  This kind of collaborative role play is so important for the development of the children’s imagination, but also helps their personal, social and communication skills as they learn how to build a story together, listen to others and share resources, take on different roles and explain their ideas.

As the days get colder and darker we say goodbye to a wonderful Autumn and look forward to our next exciting celebration…are we allowed to talk about Christmas yet!!