At Little Elms, we've been exploring clay.
Today we looked at freely manipulating clay without making a finished product.
We started off by giving the children small bits of clay for them to explore freely with a wide variety of resources. This will generate an understanding in the children of ways to make patterns and marks.
The way that this child explored her clay inspired others to explore their clay in a similar way. By using open ended resources, different shape and size marks can be seen here showing the child testing out their own ideas.
The children were proud of their achievements and chose to take their creations home.
'Look I made a face!'
By giving the children freedom to use their own imagination and take ownership of their own creations, we have enabled them to recognise their own ability and confidence in what they can achieve.
As a result of this experience, we have recognised that the children consider each others ideas to develop their own. Next Monday we will provide a large lump of clay for them to explore together.
We have been exploring similarities and differences using different resources and enabling environments. By providing a broad selection of vegetables, the children at Little Elms have been making potato heads.
Using our reflective table we observed our own features and recreate them using different vegetables.
We provided additional resources to help develop imagination, like sticky eyes, sticks and pens to be able to add different features.
These are some of our vegetable creations!
This is a snowman made by one of the children.
'This is Rudolph and another reindeer!'
This is a spider! One of the children enjoyed pushing sticks into a carrot to create a spider.
'This is my daddy' one of the children said when showing some of his friends the potato creation he had made.
One child made lollipops connecting radishes to sticks.
This child made her mummy with a carrot. They added sticky eyes and used a pen to draw a smiley mouth. They said 'My mummy is always happy'
'This is a ghost' said one child
What you need to make potato heads
Lots of different vegetables - we used:
potatoes
sweet potatoes
carrots
parsnips
runner beans
radishes
pumpkins
mushrooms
(you can use any vegetables you like)
We also used sticky eyes, whiteboard markers and creative sticks.
Can you make some potato and vegetable heads of your own?
At first we gave the babies a variety of pumpkins with a small amount of paint and let them explore.
As the babies became more familiar with the feel of the paint and the new sensation they were exploring we added more colours to the canvas.
One of the babies really enjoyed exploring and he spent time manipulating the paint not only on the canvas but on the surrounding wall coverings too. 
This baby enjoyed the sensation of the paint on his skin and fully emerged himself in the experience for 45 minutes.
The whole nursery observed this session with many of the older children keen to join in. Our next creative me session will involve the older children exploring the paints in a similar way to develop new knowledge and skills based around the investigation of art materials using senses and the world around us.
Today marks our first blog to launch our regular weekly ‘Creative Me’ session at Pebbles. We will spend one session a week inspiring ourselves and the children to develop our inner creativity by exploring resources and topics that interest us.
This week we have been exploring our own individual features so we combined this area of interest with resources we found on the beach that we collected during one of our beach trips last week.
We used glue to stick the shingle onto a large canvas, spreading it inside the letters very carefully.
Then we used as much shingle as possible to cover the glue.
“It’s sticking to my finger” said one child.
To give the children ownership of the canvas we encouraged them to add their own marks around the outside using a selection of coloured chalks and crayons.
We all observed each other’s eyes and discussed how many we had as the children drew themselves.
“I have two eyes”
We are all very proud and of our creation which we have displayed in the hallway At preschool for us all to see and add to as the days go by.
On our ‘Creative Me ‘ Monday sessions at Little Elms, we've been busy exploring Autumn.
This Monday we looked at making autumnal leaf tiles. The children were able to freely explore the clay allowing them to mold the clay however they liked. Many different resources were provided to help them choose how they wanted to shape their clay. Some children enjoyed using a rolling pin to flatten out their clay. Some children enjoyed using their hands to manipulate and shape their clay as well as rolling it into a ball with their hands.
Autumnal materials were provided to allow them to explore their creativity such as autumn leaves, leaf sequins, beads, red and gold glitter, autumn inspired paints and buttons. Some of the children used leaves to press into the clay while other’s enjoyed pressing buttons, beads and leaf sequins into their creation.
Some of the children explored paint mixing , using it to decorate their clay. One of the children discovered that they could mix orange if they mixed red and yellow paint together. They spent the whole morning telling the other children how they had done this. Other children added leaves to their clay and then painted the leaves with different colours.
This child enjoyed adding paint to their creation. They liked using paint to change the colour of their leaf.
This child wanted to add little leaves onto their big leaf and recognised that they were turning their brown leaf orange. They also added glitter to make their leaf sparkly and shiny.
This child enjoyed making holes in her clay using a paintbrush. She liked pressing her paintbrush into the clay and then used paint to fill the holes back in.
We have all enjoyed exploring clay. I wonder what we'll use clay to make next?
At Little Elms we've been exploring autumn!
We decided today that we would have a look at autumnal scents and what would happen if we added them to playdough.
We looked at different seasonal scents inspired by our allotment trips where we are growing pumpkins and apples that we've picked. We added spices to our orange playdough and apple hair conditioner to our green playdough. We took turns adding scents and colours as well as stirring in all of our ingredients.
We liked investigating our autumnal playdough.
Here's how we made our playdough
Plain Flour
Vegetable Oil
Salt
Water
Apple Hair Conditioner - For Apple Flavoured Playdough
Cinnamon and Nutmeg Spice - For Pumkpin Flavoured Playdough
Food Colouring or Paint for colour
I wonder where our creativity will take us next?
This week we have started to explore clay and creating seasonal animals. We manipulated the clay using our fingers and added our own resources.
Meet our hedgehog family.
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