This week for our topic of autumn, we explored Halloween! The children had a great time exploring the different pumpkins and using their communication and language skills, to describe the variety of pumpkins we had. “This pumpkin is small!” One child had said. “This one has stripes” another said. 

After observing and describing our pumpkin’s the children then had the chance to cut open the pumpkins and investigate what the inside of the pumpkins looked like. They were fascinated to see the differences and similarities between each of the pumpkins, whilst using their gross motor skills and putting their knowledge on risky play to the test, when cutting them open. 

To extend on our Halloween activities further, the children split into two groups to make some jelly and to carve a pumpkin! The children got to make choices of what to put inside the jelly to make it “spooky” and what kind of face our pumpkin could have. “A happy face” and “It needs teeth” some of the children said about the pumpkin, and another at the jelly activity chose “spiders and goggly eyes” to add to the mixture. When carving our pumpkin, we used our risky play knowledge again to display our gross motor skills following along the lines for the face, and made sure we were very careful when using the carving tool. Well done everyone!

We enjoyed exploring our jelly once it had set for our Halloween party, and used our fine motor skills to retrieve the spiders stuck in the jelly! Lovely learning this week everyone and Happy Halloween!