02/10/2026
🌟 Brightstart @ Thorpes – What a Busy Week! 🌟
The children have had another fantastic week full of exploring, investigating, creating and, most importantly, learning through play! We have continued to be fascinated by roads and transportation, creating our very own large-scale road maps in the construction area and extending our play outdoors. Through this imaginative and collaborative play, the children have been developing their communication and language skills as they shared ideas, negotiated roles and talked about where their vehicles were travelling. They were also developing their physical skills and spatial awareness as they moved around their maps, positioned vehicles and worked together to create their designs.
As part of our ‘All About Me’ the children have loved drawing portraits of one another. They thought it was great fun drawing on each other’s faces! 😄 This experience provided lots of opportunities to develop fine motor control, hand-eye coordination and mark-making skills, while exploring different media and surfaces. The children were encouraged to look closely at facial features and represent what they could see, supporting their self-expression, creativity and developing awareness of themselves and others.
We have also been strengthening our hand-eye coordination through threading activities. The children carefully manipulated the materials, concentrating on controlling their movements and developing their fine motor skills, coordination, perseverance and concentration. These skills are important foundations for future tasks such as using tools, drawing and eventually developing pencil control.
Our mathematical learning continued as we explored shapes and colours using lolly sticks. The children created their own shapes, developing their ability to recognise and talk about shape, size, colour and position. They were also developing problem-solving skills as they worked out how to arrange the sticks to create different shapes.
🔎 We became scientists in the garden! 🔎The children investigated what is magnetic and what is not, making predictions about which objects would connect to the magnet before testing their ideas. They were fascinated by the results! This provided wonderful opportunities for developing curiosity, critical thinking, prediction, observation and early scientific understanding. The children were encouraged to talk about what they noticed and compare their findings.
🍂 Our natural treasure investigation! 🍂 On Thursday, we were very kindly donated a huge collection of conkers, pinecones, acorns and leaves, which we explored in a sensory tuff tray. The children enjoyed investigating the different natural objects, noticing their textures, shapes, colours, sizes and characteristics. This encouraged descriptive language, sensory exploration and curiosity about the natural world.
We then extended our learning outdoors by building on our previous exploration of rolling different objects down tubes. This time, the children rolled conkers through tubes covered in paint and watched as they created wonderful patterns! 🎨 The children were exploring cause and effect, noticing how the movement of the conkers created different marks and patterns. They were also developing their understanding of movement, speed, direction and prediction, while strengthening their physical coordination and problem-solving skills.
The learning continued even after the painting had finished! The children independently washed the conkers so that they could be enjoyed again. This simple but purposeful experience supported their independence, responsibility and understanding of caring for resources, while also developing their physical skills as they handled, scrubbed and cleaned the objects.
