So here we are, introducing our next theme unit, we are gloriously swept up with the new season, and enjoying all the material we are being presented with by nature to explore Autumn & Harvest.
To begin with, I have reset the kitchen, where we are centre all of the activities we prepare for, with a Harvest Experimental Play station.
I set up the shelving unit and his water table ‘desk’ with the barrel where we usually keep our potatoes, a tray, a small hessian bag, several unused half size paper coffee cups, a bucket and several utensils. We keep vegetables and fruit accessible along the shelving unit, and Squirrel is SO into really getting experimental with them!
He loves transferring them around…
Lots of sorting by type and size…
Experimenting with their shapes and textures, trying to squish the soft mushrooms, knock on the hard pumpkins, run his fingers across the grainy skin of the potatoes…
Playing with mass with the containers…
Playing with weights while carrying them around…
Rolling and throwing them around…
And using our giant grid paper to line them up and organise them. In the duration of our very first play with this set up, he confirmed new word associations for ‘pumpkin’, ‘mushroom’ and ‘sweet potato’, already being familiar with ‘potato’ and ‘apple’, and a new sign for ‘vegetable’.
He is returning to them over and over again. He has always had access to the vegetables to look at, but this presentation has enabled him to be really excited by them, and let his curiosity lead him with playing with them.
He will have access to it all, introducing different fruits and veggies along the way, throughout the duration of the unit.
This post is for Unit 2, Autumn & Harvest, and is also linked to 1+1+1=1 Tot School Gathering Place.
