Scratch art

We've been using these Scratch Art doodle sheets as an alternative to drawing on paper, they create such magnificent multicoloured pictures. 

Available from yellow moon http://www.yellowmoon.org.uk/cat_id/ARTSSCRA/product-Scratch-Art-Doodle-Sheets-A101.htm

Painting with plastic eggs.

I've seen this activity a lot on Pinterest and pinned it as to remind me since before Easter and finally I've remembered to do it now in May! 

I filled the plastic eggs with a little squirt of poster paint and closed them back up again, I then set the painting activity up with the eggs for my 3year olds. At first they both looked at me like I had gone completely mad but then explained the things which they could do with the eggs to create their marks. 

They were both more convinced and started to tap the eggs on the paper to make them "crack", once they had done this with all they eggs I was then asked "what do we do now?" I explained they could do what they wanted with it, one of them decided to close it and roll the egg around in the paint whilst the other child kept it open and used both halves to print circle patterns. 

Unfortunately the children I chose to do this activity with we're not as interest as I thought they would be but we still discovered that we could create lots of marks in different ways using the same tools. 

This just shows that not all children are willing to join in with all activities but can still learn something by talking about it and watching others as well. 

Painting with large lolly sticks

I used large lolly sticks for this painting activity with my 2 year olds which created some great marks and colourful patterns too.

Play dough Currant buns in a bakers shop

A favourite song at the moment with my 3year olds in 5 currant buns in a bakers shop, I then used that as our theme for another Play dough activity.
First I made 4 fresh batches of play dough with the children each with different colours of their choice and we added some essences to each colour dough as well for a added sensory experience.
Both the of the children were very keen to get creative with their new doughs and took their colours off to the table to play they both used the pots I Intended to store the dough in and pushed a circle print into the dough with it, this created our buns. I then gave then some new beads which we used as currants.
We sang the song together and acted it out too with our "currant buns" passing them to each other and taking turns with buying them as well.

The beads were a great addition to the Play dough as they allow the children to use every small movements to hold them, pick them up and push them in and out of the dough so if great for developing those pincer movements needed for writing.

Small world - Construction site

For this small world scene I used a range of different texture and shaped sensory materials that had been previously used for other activities (rice, pasta, oats etc) and set up some toy construction vehicles and people.
The children had great fun pushing the trucks and and rollers around in the materials then filling and tipping just like on the construction site we had seen whilst walking to the park in the morning.