This month we have welcomed Autumn with some seasonal activities, as well as exploring lots of new and imaginative play experiences.

Blue Monkeys have been engaging in lots of imaginative pretend play as they explored a hairdresser’s role play, looking after the toy babies by feeding them with bottles & walking them in the buggies, making each other feel better with the doctor’s kit & role playing as builders with building bricks & the tool kit! Our babies have also been exploring lots of messy play, including painting with our whole bodies and exploring the texture of moon sand.

Our Pink Monkeys have been interested in the Hungry Caterpillar & through exploring this story we have been identifying numbers, shapes & colours. This has led onto lots of discussions about different animals & where they live, we have used flashcards to match the animal to the habitat, & then we have explored this further by recreating the different habitats on our tufty tray. The children discovered the textures of soil, sand, rice, blocks, tissue paper & different animals. This month our toddlers have also recreated the Bear Hunt story & travelled through a sensory pathway consisting of a; river, forest & snowstorm all made up using different sensory materials.

In Red Monkey’s, our home corner has become Monkey Puzzle Hospital! The children have enjoyed pretending to give each other and the toy babies medicine to get better, explored & talked about all the different doctor’s equipment & recovered in a ‘hospital bed’. Chimps have expanded on this by talking about different parts of their bodies, & they have been drawing around each other’s bodies to extend & strengthen this. Apes have also been listening to the three little pigs story & exploring it in different ways including the sensory story sack, building a house of bricks together & also acting out the whole story. The children were then able to reflect & recall what had happened in the story.

This month we also raised money for the charity Jeans for Genes, all staff & children donned their denims in support of this, we had blue themed activities & held a bake sale…a big thank you to everyone who donated & helped us raise a grand total of £400!