November kicks off with a bang!

With the dark evenings drawing in we have found some brilliant ways to light up our activities across our Footsteps sites by celebrating and learning about some big events in the Calendar.

The beginning of November has been a whirlwind as we celebrated a world of colour.  With fireworks and Diwali taking top spots on the calendar recently, we enjoyed lots of different activities which have brightened up our walls (and sometimes our clothes too).

Diwali is the festival of light and we showed the children a special video so they would understand the importance of this festival in the Hindu culture. Our children’s talents shone as they made their Diwali clay pots and lamps, necklaces and dressed up in colourful clothes. Glitter, paint, sponges, glue, and tissue paper were out in full force as we enjoyed our Diwali themed paintings. We explored different foods as part of snack time too with samosas and poppadoms proving popular.

We have so many ways of accessing these brilliant teaching themes.  From culture, religion and history to foods, traditions and celebrations, we make it fully accessible for the children. We had some beautifully designed tuff trays from our amazing team.  From Rangoli patterns to shooting rockets and Catherine wheels. And whilst they didn’t look so amazing for long, the children loved the touch and feel of the different materials as they explored with their senses.

We learnt all about bonfires, how to make them and lots about how to hold sparklers and fire safety.  We practised cooking marshmallows over a candle flame – which everyone thoroughly enjoyed, and tried a hot chocolate as part of our snack time. We made fruit skewer rockets and firework biscuits too.

We made sparklers from breadsticks, chocolate and sprinkles, and practised our numbers and shapes creating rockets. We made Catherine wheel puff pastry pizzas and had a banging time rolling, spreading and sprinkling – not to mention tasting too. We practised our mark making in glitter – making swirls and lines and thinking about all the noises our fireworks might make. Our toilet roll stock has been run down completely, as we enjoyed using them to do some firework junk modelling to make our rockets. We also loved practising our scissor skills cutting them up to find some great new ways of printing fireworks.

It has been a bright and sparkly time we have all thoroughly enjoyed!