Dear Parents,

I hope you are well and are keeping safe. We know it is a difficult time at the moment and you may be finding it hard to juggle work as well as providing activities to support your child’s development. We are here to help with this, as you may already have found, I have uploaded a document to Babysdays, which has a large number of simple ideas for you to use. The ideas I provide do not necessarily interest all of your children but the beauty of these ideas is that they can easily be altered to suit your child’s interests. If there are any documents or specific ideas you would like to see or even if your need to just talk to one of our members of staff for a bit of support then please do not hesitate to call.

This week, due to the exceptionally good weather, the children have spent most of their time outside. We ate our meals outside; we slept outside and had lots of fun taking part in messy play. As a result of a discussion with Humphrey surrounding the Elon Musk Starlink satellites that passed overhead Monday-Wednesday, the children took part in a painting activity where they chose various colours to flick at paper in order to create their own representation of the phenomenon. Humphrey asked if they were like stars and this led to further discussion around space, rockets, planets and meteors. Danny pointed out that when blue and red paint are mixed together, it turned purple. Thomas was excited when the paint made a ‘splat’ noise on the paper. Humphrey labelled a number of the paint spots to be planets and when he described a longer mark to be ‘a meteor that comes crashing down to earth this way’, he moved his ‘earth’ to be linear with the meteor.

The children have also been busy with water play. They became completely immersed in pouring water down pipes from one container to another. Alf was very excited to empty and fill different containers of various sizes. Humphrey developed a game of racing the balls down the tubes, using the water to make it go faster, which led to discussions about currents and waves and how they can alter the speed an object moves. Joshua caught on to this idea and copied the action of rolling a ball down the tube and clapping to show he was proud of his achievement. We considered how long it took to fill up the pots to quarter full, half full, ¾ full and completely full.

We have also cooked stir-fry on the fire; Humphrey and Paul were Michelle’s little helpers, helping to gather the tools and equipment, as well as learning the boundaries that need to be followed in order to stay safe. The children then sat together at a picnic table and tried the stir-fry they had cooked where Danny told everyone “it was so good”. As a special treat, the children then got to roast marshmallows on the fire, which went down very well. As an extension of this topic of fire, the children have been particularly interested in firemen and the role they have in extinguishing fires. Danny climbed onto the trampoline and explained that it was his ‘fire engine’ and pointed to a number of buttons, which ‘turned it on’ or ‘turned on the lights’. He then demonstrated where the house was and how fire fighters extinguish fires.

Stay safe, and enjoy the sunshine whilst you can!

The team at Broughton.