Lots & Lots of outdoor fun!

The weather has been so changeable recently, either very cold and dry or mild and wet. I'm honestly not sure which I prefer because although the drier weather is welcome the cold isn't & yet on the damp, wet, mild days everyone gets wet & dirty whilst playing in the playground! But then the damp weather provides lots of water for the mud kitchen.
The children have had fun building outdoors, playing with clay to & making patterns with sticks etc. 

A fire with popcorn & marshmallows.

A clay spider.

For 6 weeks we will be having 3 outdoor mornings as the children are taking part in a 6 week programme with Aidan from Sporty Tots and it's easier to have the room set up for lunch & play outside whilst 1/2 the class at a time goes over to the main school hall for a 30 minute session of Sporty Tots. Our other outdoor mornings are Tuesday, when we have our fire and Thursday when we go to visit Bear Woods. This year, the class are loving their time up in Bear Woods and can easily put in 45 minutes climbing on the log snake, rolling down the slope, climbing up the slope, cooking in the mud kitchen, chatting to their older siblings in the main school over the fence and looking for buds and leaves & signs of Spring. A few years ago one of our caretakers built seats up in Bear Woods for the class to sit on at snack time and this year one child discovered that it's possible to roll a ball along the seats & it has become a popular game with this class - one child sits at each end of the bench and they roll the ball between them, it works as well on the ones on the slope as the one at the top on the slope. It is lovely to watch the children playing together and laughing as they try to roll the ball up the bench. 

The benches are perfect for rolling a ball up & down.

Today 3 boys stood in the den and watched over the fence at the nursery below, the school carpark, the delivery vans  & the traffic passing by the school. They had a wonderful conversation about how some of the delivery men had taken all the toys from the nursery to turn them into food, they were able to tell me exactly what item would be a certain piece of food e.g. the bouncers were to be roast potatoes!

Watching the world go by!