Month: November 2020

Woodwork has many benefits for children’s learning. It is an enjoyable activity and the levels of concentration, engagement and perseverance when working with wood are often unmatched in other activities. 

Woodwork has been helping the children to develop both their gross and fine motor skills e.g., by using a saw, holding a nail in place and using both one-handed and two-handed tools. Hand-eye co-ordination is also developing as children learn to handle tools with increasing control and care.

For space week, the children designed their own aliens:

Our clay journey began a few weeks ago with the children discovering, playing with and exploring clay. The children have enjoyed first hand ways of working with the clay by pinching, twisting, rolling and poking.

Using clay can connect children to an important natural resource that has been used for the creation of objects for thousands of years. We discovered that clay in the past has been used for containers to store crops, water, seeds; bowls to eat and drink out of and pots to cook with.

The children have enjoyed learning how clay behaves and have started to learn various hand building techniques. The children took a piece of clay 5cm in diameter, rolled the clay into a ball, whilst in the palm of their hand, they used their thumb to pierce a hole in the middle and started to use the technique of ‘pinch and push’ to create a thumb pot or pinch pot.

We celebrated Diwali the Hindu Festival of Light by making diva lamps using the same hand building techniques. We also enjoyed painting and decorating them.

We practised making our clay flat and used other natural materials to create self portraits.

Oisin even made a car and a little person!

We have also enjoyed using tools and different objects from around the class to press and print with.