Play, story starters and decorating

Harry and Peter played Lego together for an hour this morning, without any bickering! This is unusual and very nice so I let them carry on without interrupting and I researched some WW1 activities and started thinking about Christmas ideas. If we don't have anywhere to be, or anything urgent to do, I do try to let them get on with self-directed activities if they are doing them well. I think this skill is just as important as the activities I prepare for them.

I brought some big cardboard tubes home from Scouts this week and we had a great play with these for an hour as well. We started just rolling marbles and balls down them, then we taped a starting line to the carpet to test which ball rolled the furthest.

We also built small towers to knock over by rolling things down the tube and an arch for them to roll through.

Harry built a 'city defence' for one of his towers and was pleased that this couldn't be knocked over! This was a great use of engineering skills: he knew that the building needed a wider base to be more sturdy and eventually it became a city wall to protect his tower.

We have been using this online story starter resource from Scholastic. The boys love spinning the wheels to create their story starter and the finished pieces can be printed to keep. 

We had been waiting for a delivery today, so when it came we went out to get Christmas cake supplies and paint testers. We didn't make a cake today, as I needed the oven to cook pizza for tea, but we will soon. We also talked to my dad on the phone and he is coming to help us decorate our hall this weekend so we spent the rest of the afternoon pulling wallpaper off! Harry really enjoyed getting involved with this and they will enjoy seeing their Granddad at the weekend. 

History timeline additions, human body activities and play

We had our group session with two other families yesterday morning. Firstly, our friends read their chapter continuing the group story we are writing. We also shared our history timeline contributions - we have sheets on Nelson Mandela, Machu Picchu and the Battle of Blenheim to add to our timeline, along with our sheet on the first moon landing. I still actually need to display the timeline at home and I am thinking where would be best for it. 

We also did some human body activities. We drew round one of the children on a large roll of paper and they each chose a mystery internal organ from a bag, then we discussed what it was and placed it on the body outline. These were the organ pictures we used, which I printed from the internet.

I read books to Peter and a couple of the other younger children while the others looked at a model brain and skull and talked about what the different parts of the brain do. Harry and Peter both brought their Lego sticker books to do at craft time, which is around the last 30 minutes of our 3 hour session.

We had a relaxed afternoon yesterday after our group session and a nice day full of play today. Peter has a cold and Harry is always tired on a Wednesday after his late Beavers and Gymnastics sessions on Monday and Tuesday.

We played an afternoon of post office games, as we found some leftover bits and pieces from a kit we had, including ink stamps, envelopes and stickers. We wrote several notes to each other and played at posting them, so this game involved some reading and writing practise for Harry! It turned into a game where we pretended to be Paddington Bear posting things to his Aunt Lucy. Harry and Peter have been listening to the Paddington stories, read very well by Stephen Fry.

We have built lots of Lego. Harry has many sets of Lego but most of them weren't built up so we sorted through everything and built all his police vehicles together. He is great at following the instructions, even on big models. Peter played with the things we had built and with his Duplo at the same time. It got very messy at one point but they did both help to clear all the pieces into the correct trays at the end of today.

Harry has also done Conquer Maths lessons on halves and rounding. Peter is enjoying playing an Alphablocks game on the Cbeebies iPad app, which has been good for his letter recognition.

Family visit

I took Harry and Peter to visit Stuart's family, who live near Lancaster, at the start of this week and we stayed for a night. They had a great time playing with their older cousins who are now on school holidays and it was really nice that Peter joined in rather than being the baby. We went to this lovely tea room/garden centre which had some nice play areas and they also had a paddle in the river.

Harry took some photos on the way home - these were the things that interested him... traffic cones

....Cumbrian sheep 

.....and Peter's feet!

Purposeful play time

We haven't spent much time at home recently due to the wonderful summer weather, so Peter has been mainly joining us in beach, forest and playground trips, alongside lots of water play in the garden and watering the plants at the allotment to keep them alive. 

Harry has been to some school holiday enjoy-a-ball sessions where he stays for 4 hours so Peter and I have spent some lovely time together alone this week. I don't think I planned any of the play activities in this post, they just happened and I think all purposeful play can be like that. It just needs an engaged adult to facilitate, make sense of the experience and extend it by talking about it and joining in. Learning areas like colour, number and shape come naturally into that for us. 

We have been playing lotto games, practising taking turns and memory skills. Peter knows all the colours in the Red Dog, Blue Dog game now and he enjoyed pointing out all the pictures in Alphabet Lotto and saying the names.

We made pancakes and Peter did very good and controlled mixing, pouring and whisking. Much better to use real ingredients than to pretend, and you eat the finished product! He was concentrating so much and it was nice for him to do everything instead of sharing the jobs between them. Harry dislikes pancakes to the extent that the smell almost makes him sick so I make them for Peter as a treat when Harry is out.

We have been building lots of marble runs and talking about the colours of the pieces as we add them. Peter even had a go at building one himself. Putting things like this together is great for hand strength and motor control and for investigating cause and effect.

We sang nursery rhymes and Peter used some of his puppets to act them out. Here is Humpty Dumpty falling from the wall. We used to read and sing lots of nursery rhymes with Harry and he has always been very good at rhyming so perhaps that has helped. This must also be one of the earliest stages of comprehension for a small child, as they understand what the (sometimes only four) lines of a rhyme mean and, for example, make an ouch sound when Humpty lands!

We used up some stickers from old sticker books and I noticed that Peter had grouped the same kinds together on the paper - pink fish, green fish and squid so we talked about the differences and used some descriptive words like curly, long and stripy. We counted the stickers in each group too. 

Purposeful play time

I fit in purposeful play with Peter at random times when Harry is engaged with something, such as listening to story CDs or doing his sports classes and Peter is not already busy with something of his own. I try really hard to make sure this time happens because I enjoy it and don't get to spend much time one-to-one with Peter. Also, the early years of Harry's life were mainly spent in this way and he has a great understanding of maths and science concepts from this basis. 

I have started talking to Peter about shapes as well as colour and number during our purposeful play recently. We have had fun with the stacking cups this week. Peter LOVES the game where we hide a marble under the cups and turn them over to find it. We said the colour each time we turned one over this time. He was really cute closing his eyes while I hid the marble!

We also looked at the shapes underneath the cups. I helped Peter to run his finger along the edges of the shapes while saying they were straight sides. I asked him if he knew any of the shapes and he identified the star and the triangle.

Peter managed to build the tower in the correct order when I told him which colour to use next. He often gets confused between pink and purple and is really bemused trying to understand it! He built this a few times, knocking it over each time.

Peter has taken a liking to this book at the moment so we cleared the playroom floor and read/sung it with all the actions (several times - resulting in me having the song in my head for hours!). 

Harry joined in and they had a great time! Here is Peter flapping his arms like a bird, stomping like an elephant (quickly!) and slithering like a snake.

Peter played in the sink washing a few things after some painting and he talked lots about whether things were floating or sinking. I gave him a couple of extra objects made of metal, which sank, but then he put them in his 'boat' and they floated. I think water play is so valuable for learning. My boys have both been fascinated by how things behave in the water and how water behaves when poured, splashed, swished etc.

Peter loved doing activities in the Octonauts magazine. He usually enjoys using the stickers but he did more this time, including matching the colour to the creature and following straight and curved lines with a pen. I think I am going to have to start buying a magazine each soon!

Peter has been playing his first educational app on the iPad - Agnitus. He has been matching shapes, counting, and finding matching pairs. I find the animation and voice quite annoying but I think the content is good. I sit with him while he does it and talk to him about what he is doing. 

We practised some throwing and catching, here is Peter all ready for a catch! Peter has really good hand-eye co-ordination compared to Harry at the same age and he loves ball play. This is great for his motor skills and understanding of concepts like roll, throw, kick, catch, high and fast/slow.

Purposeful play time

These play activities cover a few weeks as we had three trips out last week plus a museum workshop and French class so there wasn't much time for home-based activity!

While Harry did some Roman craft I gave Peter tissue paper and pva glue. He ripped the tissue paper himself (good fine motor practice) and glued it to paper. We talked about the colours as he did it and he was really engrossed for half an hour. He loved holding up the glue spreader and seeing the glue fall to the paper.

I have started using these alphabet colouring pages from Activity Village with Peter. We have just used 'A' so far and he pointed to the objects and named some of them while colouring them. I pointed them out too and emphasised the A sound.

We have been getting a lot of our Orchard Toys games out again recently. I love playing board games with both boys and they both mainly play really nicely, taking turns and follow it through to the end. We played Spotty Dogs and Peter liked spinning the spinner and we counted the dots and bones together. We will use games a lot over the next couple of years as we did with Harry and we also play with all of us together sometimes - Spotty Dogs and Ladybirds are both great for early counting.

We also played Red Dog, Blue Dog, a lotto game. I asked Peter which colour his object was each time he chose a card and he mostly gets it right now. 

I have been using these books from the library for counting. We read them while Harry was doing his gymnastics class. We also talked lots about the pictures on the pages and the colours, as well as counting the objects.

There is a room in the building where Harry does his enjoy-a-ball class which stores the playgroup toys and we go in there sometimes to wait, which is where we found these great magnets. Peter made them into 'snakes' and he made a long one for daddy and a short one for baby, so we talked about long and short while he was making them. He also made flowers and we talked lots about the colours he was using while he did it. This was such a great learning activity for concepts of colour and size and he remembered when we went back this week and asked to go and make snakes!

Purposeful play week

My aim with purposeful play is to introduce and cement concepts such as colours, numeracy (including concepts of number, size, weight, shape etc) and letters through focused play and also to extend vocabulary by talking about what we are doing and using lots of descriptive words.

Peter obviously takes part in lots of activities outside specific purposeful play, so the amount of focused play activity I do with him depends on what else we have been doing. He joins in with craft and cooking at home and comes on all our trips out, as well as directing his own play, playing with Harry, playing out in the garden and taking part in under-5's music group at The Sage.

Peter chose a bag of new marbles at Hamley's in London and has been very interested in them, so it was natural to use these for some extended activities.

I asked him to find the biggest and smallest ones from a selection. We talked about some features of the marbles while holding them - smooth, heavy and shiny.

I gave him a big metal bowl to hear the noisy sound the marbles made inside. He liked making a big crash by rolling them out of a tube into the bowl. 

He rolled them into my hand from the tube too and we lined them up and counted them a few times. We talked about the different colours. He likes the 'football' one and the 'tiger' one with orange and brown stripes.

I had seen this idea on The Imagination Tree website (I often browse here for craft inspiration) and prepared the egg box in advance by painting the inside with acrylic paint. I gave Peter a tray of pom poms and asked him to put the pom poms in the correct colour hole. When he had done that we got them out again and counted them in rows. We talked about big and small and compared the biggest and smallest. I also then gave him some Lego pieces and he sorted those too. I left this out on the playroom table and he has gone back to it several times to put the pom poms in the holes again.

Some of the purposeful play type activities I do with Peter are planned and some come about naturally, like this water based one. He had come into the garden while I was hanging washing out and started playing with the rain water in the water table. I gave him a bowl and a stick and asked if they would float. He tried them and they did - he said the bowl was a boat. He then picked up a big bucket to see if that would float too!