Wow what a great start to the year so far!!
The children have settled into school beautifully and have just started exploring the whole of the reception base. We have introduced this week our lovely indoor and outdoor learning spaces. In each of these, we challenge the children to many different activities. For the children to develop their movement we always select activities that will challenge their fine and gross motor skills.
Gross motor skills are movements that develop their movement from their core. We get the children thinking about big movements that have to come from the centre of their bodies and give them the opportunity to use all of their muscles.
Fine motor skills are movements that are very small and use a lot of concentration. We all use our fine motor skills every day but as children it is something that we need to learn to develop. We get the children doing small pinching movements or threading that means a lot of movements with a small part of your body.
In indoor learning this week we have asked the children to do some threading with pipe cleaners, as well as use tweezers to pick up very small beans and pom poms, before sorting them into pots. We also got the children doing some painting, showing us their grip of a paint brush, they had some large paper on the floor that they enjoyed mark making on and they also had a great time in our role play fruit and veg shop.
In outdoor learning we gave the children lots of challenges. We got out our large obstacle course which the children have to put together to make a course for their friends to follow. We put out some bean bags that the children loved throwing into our numbered buckets, we heard lots of great counting and saw some good co-ordination too. In the sand pit we gave the children lots of buckets and spades, it was great to see them working together and we even had some weighing happening. The children liked exploring our water wall, using many different containers to fill up the pipes. We even saw some great writing happening outside where children used the tracing mats to look at the sounds we have learnt.
