It's all about stories!: The Park

This week we took the children to the park. There were many reasons for this - lots of them love exploring outside, they are interested in the outdoor environment, they talk about the seasons changing and they just play and enjoy themselves freely when outside in a large space. So all dressed up as it's pretty cold, off we went.

Here's what happened and how we linked it to a story...

We crossed the little bridge - the children looked over the top and through the holes at the ducks and gulls in the river - we tell them the real names of the birds and talk about how they are swimming about looking for some food.

When we've crossed the bridge we feed the birds with some little bits of bread - not too much though. Hundreds (well it seemed like hundreds) of black-headed gulls fly down at this point and we are joined by some greylag geese and a family of swans - they're really big - bigger than the children. But the children love it - they point and laugh at the funny birds.

So we move on... run around the maze for a bit, have a snack, and then get out our scavenger hunt bags.

The children fill their bags with loads of beautiful leaves of all different colours. We'll use them for an activity exploring glue and leaves next week.

Later, at home, we read Silly Suzy Goose by Petr Horacek - Suzy wants to be different from all the other geese and tries to imitate all the other animals - the children join in with the animal noises and actions. The Suzy tries to wake up the sleeping lion - we talk about whether this is such a good idea! A lovely story for joining in, sharing and promoting talk.