Kia Ora, welcome back to term 3. It is great to have all our children and their whanau/families back after a two week break.
We were straight into it this morning with the children spotting the changes that have happened over the holidays. No doubt everyone noticed the huge deck that is in the process of being built – this will be a wonderful, valuable space for us when it is finished (hopefully the end of this week!).
Christine and Kim were busy over the holidays building a new mud kitchen for outside. The children had an amazing amount of fun exploring this today, creating lots of mud pies and mud soup.
Shinayah “I’m making some yummy food”
Briah-Rose “you know this isn’t fun. We’re having to work really hard on this”
Today we had this outside near the building, however we have designed this so it can be moved around our outdoor space easily; thereby introducing different materials for the children to use in their outdoor baking. We hope soon to add a blackboard so the children can also write or draw their favourite mud recipes – delicious.
A Mud Pie Kitchen is an incredible way to encourage imaginative play, leading to creative thinking, curiosity, and experimentation.
Gooey, gooshy, squishy, gushy mud!
Playing with mud is “not only loads of fun, but blends together science, art, math, social studies, sensory input, and language by providing opportunities to accomplish, communicate, conserve, cooperate, create, count, facilitate, differentiate (size, shape, amount, colour), discover, explore, express, converse, initiate, and be gleeful” (Zavitkovsky, 1996)
Christine