In preschool we have been focusing on food and enjoyed many activities around this.
We started our new learning journey by picking toppings to put on pizza! We practised applying food from our home corner, selecting and identifying our favourites and having discussions on where they came from. Understanding what we eat is a part of physical and personal development for the little ones and learning about its origins promotes a healthy relationship with such.
We also practised making dough and colouring it with paint, using our hands to mix and playing with it after. This was an excellent tool for imaginative play and a great foundation for creativity amongst the preschoolers together.
We also got our hands messy during messy play! We love to learn through sensory experiences and explored textures in food doing so. We found the colours in the spaghetti combined as they were mixed during the day, observing colours and combining them is a crucial step in artistic and scientific development. We are keen to implement this is into different areas in play.
We learnt that lots of vegetables are green and carbohydrates are often beige. We also noticed that fruits have the most colours and the functions of all areas. We looked at The Eat Well Plate and noticed that the variety of colour resembled our sensory tray. We practised reorganising these foods into their colour groups and spoke about what the function of each was during this.
We practised play with “real vegetables” on Thursday as a dinosaur enclosure was built on a tuff tray! We noticed that broccoli resembled trees, sweetcorn and sprouts. Our dinosaurs enjoyed eating their greens and we discussed that the herbivores such as diplodocus’ would only eat greens as this was their diet, we observed their long necks for reaching up high. We enjoyed sensory exploration, observing the crunch of raw vegetables and smelling fresh greens.