Mark Making

Mark making is fun in a variety of ways. We are always trying to come up with new an inventive ways to encourage children to make marks. Here are some of our latest ideas.

 

We had a donation of cotton buds given to us, it sparked an idea to use them with food colouring for children to create their own drawings.

 

 

 

The sunshine provides a great opportunity for mess free mark making. The children were provided with pots, paint brushes and water and were encouraged to make their own marks in the yard. Of course the sun dries up the pictures and the children can recreate more.

 

Painting on a large scale gives children an opportunity for gross motor movements as they can move across the whole paper. Great to do in nice weather as we can bring the mark making outdoors.

Online Safety Concern

Online Safety Alert

Recent stories have reported a new online craze called the Momo Challenge. This has been surfacing on you tube, kids you tube and other social networking sites. A simple google search will bring up a number of articles about this. This 'freaky' character appears during some videos aimed at children and encourages them to carry out some extremely dangerous acts in the name of 'Fun' and tells them not to tell adults.  

Please be aware of what your children are doing online and keep an open dialogue of what to do if they see something they do not like. This would be enough to scare some adults never mind the little ones in our care.

We recommend that you encourage your children to use www.kiddle.co search engine instead of google, this is a child-specific search engine supported by google which prevents the appearance of things that are not suitable for them.

We will be using our safety message of the month in March as an internet safety opportunity to teach the children some basic skills of online safety and what to do if something they see or hear upsets them.

 

Communication

Speech, language and communication play a vital role in our lives. Without being able to talk to, and understand other people we can’t do things like:

• Communicate with our families.
• Buy things at the shops.
• Watch television.
• Build relationships.
• Socialise.
• Learn.
• Go to work.

Fortunately, most children do learn to communicate. Children develop communication skills from birth. They rely on speech, language and communication to be able to learn at school and play with their friends. They need these skills to reach their full potential.

Children need to:

• Learn to understand words, sentences and conversations. This is often called ‘receptive language’.
• Learn how to talk using words and sentences. This is often called ‘expressive language’.
• Know how to use their language socially. For example, listening as well as talking, or talking to a teacher differently than to a friend. This is often called ‘pragmatic language’.
• Say speech sounds correctly so they can be understood by others.

Children begin to understand words before they can say them. They then learn how to say these words and how to put them together to make sentences.
Children develop speech, language and communication skills at different rates. Some develop quickly, while others may take longer.

If you have concerns any regarding your childs speech have a look at the website http://www.talkingpoint.org.uk/parents/speech-and-language/ there is some fantastic information to help support your child's language development including a progress check where you can check your child's language development.

Incy Wincy Spider

The children used their creative skills to build a giant spider and then pretended the spider was chasing them around outside.

Expressive Arts and Design
Being Imaginative

Beginning to make believe by pretending
Uses available resources to creaate props to support role-play

Our Little Snow Angels

Do you wanna build a snowman............

Well it's been snowing, so it would have been wrong not to go out and build one.................................

Mark Making

There are lots of different ways that children can make marks without having to hold a pencil. The more fun ways children can become involved with to encourage them to explore mark making the more the muscle strength develops in their hands, enabling them to have better control over a pencil as they move onto school.

We have tried out some new mark making techniques, one was thanks to the lovely snow that fell, so our children could try some snow painting and the other was from a parent donation of lots of cotton buds, we used these with food colourings to create our own pieces of art.

10 Easy Mark Making Ideas

1. Sand
Sand is such a fun medium for making marks in and adds a great sensory experience for little ones. It can be as simple as using fingers to make different types of marks and patterns or even sticks.
To make the marks stand out more you could use damp sand. Bold sand colours are great for some colour recognition.

2. Painting with string
Set out paints and cut several different lengths of string and leave children to create. They will soon start dipping the string in the paint and making marks on the paper.


3. Making marks in playdough 
Using rolling pins, cutters, fingers, buttons and a whole variety of items to make their own creations. Children can then just squish it back together and start again.

4. Nature print painting 
We bring back so many treasures from our walks that we can paint with. Nature print painting is a fun way to explore making marks with different textures and children love to see if they can guess which item made the different marks.

5. Water Painting
If you’re looking for something a little less messy then water painting is your answer. Our children love to spend ages with a paint brush and some water making marks in the playground. On a really hot day, the water disappears almost straight away so they get a mini science experiment thrown in at the same time.


6. Chalking outside
Chalking outside offers the chance to make marks on a really large scale which is a hit with any child. Being outside also means less chalk dust on your floor inside!  There’s something about being allowed to draw on the floor that always excites and holds their attention for a long period of time.
Sometimes you could combine chalk with water and have fun painting over the chalk with water as another fun way to get those early marks in.

7. Potato print painting 
Potato print painting is such a classic mark making idea. As well as potatoes you can also use cookie cutters and even Duplo to dip into paint and make a mark.

8. Painting with Cotton Reels 
Grab a roll of paper and head outside. Use paint and add some cotton reels.
Or roll trucks through paint and watch the patterns appear on the page.


9. Salt Trays
Salt trays offer a fun way to make marks. Place the salt in a baking tray and provide brushes. Children will spend ages moving the brush around the salt, giving the tray a shake and starting again.


10.Painting with different types of brush
You could also use a dish brush or even an old hair brush. Anything that would make a different type of mark to a regular paint brush and capture the attention of little ones.