This week in Pre-School, our older children have been enjoying continuing with their Traditional Tales topic with the story of The Gingerbread Man. The children enjoyed retelling the story with the small world resources, where they built a wooden block bridge over a blue river, and used animal characters, along with a gingerbread man, to bring the story to life. This really supported their storytelling skills. 

The children explored making their own gingerbread men in a variety of ways. They used brown playdough, with googly eyes and buttons, which was great for strengthening their fine motor skills. They also decorated gingerbread men outlines, using paint and stamping with cutters before selecting their own materials such as sequins and buttons to add features.

The children also practised their scissor control this week, by carefully cutting out gingerbread man stick puppets. This helped to develop their control and coordination.

In maths, the children used tweezers to place the correct number of pompoms onto gingerbread men, as a way of practising their counting skills and number recognition.

During our adult-led activities, the children rolled dice and counted out the correct number of felt gingerbread men to further practise subitising and counting out objects from a group. 

A favourite activity this week was baking gingerbread men. The children worked hard to help help measure out the ingredients, mix them together and then shape the gingerbread men. They observed changes as the mixture combined and baked, noticing texture, colour and smell transformations. This hands-on experience supported early scientific thinking, curiosity and language development through discussion of what was happening.

In our science exploration, the children investigated why the gingerbread man couldn’t cross the river, by placing a biscuit in water and predicting what would happen. They very soon found out why he had needed help to get to the other side, rather than swimming across himself, and learnt some very important new vocabulary  too, such as ‘dissolve’.