Daisy Chain in June 2013

At the beginning of June we celebrated Universal Children's Day. This is celebrated around the world. Some countries celebrate at different times of the year. Slavonic countries celebrate on 1st June, other countries choose 20th November. Children's Day began in 1954 originally to protect  children working in dangerous circumstances  and the rights of children to an education.
The children's activities for our 'Children's day' were based on the theme of 'Around the World in a day'. We played with cooked pasta (Italy), dry coloured rice (India), had ice and snow in the water tray with Arctic animals (Canada), We had paper dolls in  natinal costume (Turkey), colouring sheets of national dress and folk tales (Poland). We dressed up in Chinese clothes, played with desert and jungle animals (Africa) and sorted wooden clogs by size and tried them on (noisily) from the Netherlands. From Britiain we explored wobbly sticky jelly.

The week before Fathers Day Daddies , Grandad's, Uncles and friends came in to play with the children. They were in great demand from all the children and read stories, played cars, played with the play dough and joined in with the daily activities. Some Daddies made clay bugs, others made finger printed lady birds etc  depending on which day they came in to play. The focus at the time being 'Mini Beasts'.

Everone found the mini beast topic interesting, we looked at snails and slugs and Sharon brought in her stick insects. Some children were keen to hold them, others preferred to look from a distance.
We made glittery spider's webs, drew around buttons to make spots on ladybirds, counted ladybirds and tried to match number to ammount by placing 3 ladybirds on number 3 etc. and we also used twigs to make stick insect pictures.

The Gruffalo  forest and cave

Several children love the Gruffalo story so we focussed  activities  on this book for a week. The role play area was turned into the Gruffalo's cave , resources were provided for dressing up as characters from the story , Sarah bought lots of puppets, jigsaws and games for us to use based on the book.

Eating Gruffalo crunble

Mixing oaty Gruffalo crumble

The Gruffalo