The last few weeks at Stepping Stones have been super busy and this week makes no exception.

There has been so much role playing going on amongst the children and it has been wonderful to stand back and listen to the conversations that have been going on. In particularly, we have had a couple of extended learning sessions in which the children have used the boats that we have made to play in. This has resulted in stormy seas, pirate mischief and island ship wrecks. We even had REAL rain and thunder and lightning inside the classroom (lots of improvisation going on).

On Wednesday we had our very first Forest School session and the children absolutely loved exploring in the forest area at the back of Stepping Stones. Each child was given a list of items to find and we did discover many exciting things such as snowdrops, bluebells, worms, snails, wild garlic, nettles, to name but a few. The session ended up in the children doing ‘The Bear Hunt’ as they made their way through the long grass and climbed over obstacles.

Today we thought we would let the children loose with lots of bowls, flour, water, salt, food colouring and let them have a jolly good mix up. They really enjoyed it and it lasted for ages! Needless to say we had to get the mop and bucket out at the end! But it was great motor skill practice and again, it really encouraged the children to sit and have some great conversations with us in which we could really engage with their imaginations and encouraging vocabulary to develop.

Painting with seaweed, number and writing practice, learning some new number songs and digging with shiny pebbles are just a few of the other activities we have been getting up to this week.