Polar sensory tub

Walking through the jungle  by Debbie Harter is a bed time favourite of ours. The book tells the story of a little girl who travels around the world meeting various animals and is back in time for tea! The rhythm of the book is great and the pictures are bright and bold resulting in a very engaging book. We are very lucky to have the Spanish/English version. We are a bilingual family so we try to encourage literacy in both languages. This is a great addition to our bilingual library.

After our success with ice suncatchers I thought some more ice sensory play would be a great idea. So I created a small world polar 'sensory tub' for 'The fairy' to play with based on the iceberg page...

To prepare this activity I froze some water in various containers (with a bit of added glitter). We then added polar animals (I do know that penguins and polar bears live in different hemispheres so this is not geographically correct but these are the polar animals we have in our toy basket!) 'The fairy' helped to choose which animals live in the cold from the selection we had. Then she chose the figure she thought most looked like the girl in the book from our selection of people.

She wanted to feel the ice and explore it to start with (including feeling it on her feet). She then decided 'The frog' may also want to feel it on his- he wasn't to impressed with his big sis's idea!

After spending time exploring the ice we used a glitter shaker to make it snow (the pic of this didn't come out very clearly). My first thought was to use flour and glitter together to make 'snow' but then thought that might get very messy. My very lovely friend and colleague C (who has given me lots of ideas to develop sensory play especially play with food) always tells me 'its not mess its creativity' but I think its better to leave that kind of mess outside or on wipable floors! Let me know if you try it and how you get along

After the snow came small world play.

Here the animals are sleeping while the penguin is telling them a story.

Hopefully we will have time to make some more 'tubs' based around other pages

Language Focus
Vocabulary: cold, slippy, shiny, sparkly, animals names (including categorising where animals live), snow different types of weather
Developing Play Skills: imaginative play is an important stage in a child's language development

Ice ice baby

In our house we love sensory and messy play. We also love sparkly things, so a while back we decided to take advantage of the chilly weather and make some 'ice suncatchers'.

We filled a bun tray and a tupperware tray with water...added some sparkly bits... I put in a few bits of wool to hold them up and left them out on our balcony to freeze. 

Like magic in the morning, we had some beautiful solid discs to admire, touch and hang up to catch the sun.

And after nap time they were gone.

This activity was great for developing concept vocabulary as well as more difficult verbs.... pour, tip, full, cold, hard, chilly, freeze, melt, drip, gone, disappear (as well as the names of colours and shapes of the sparkly bits). 

You could do this activity when the sun was a bit warmer by putting the water in the freezer rather than outside.