This week our topic book was What Do You Do About a Problem? by Kobi Yamada.
The book discusses a little boy who has a problem and the more he tries to avoid the problem it grows bigger and bigger and it keeps daunting him until one day he decides to face his problem and find a way to solve it. The children were fascinated by this book and the story helped to inspire us to talk about problems we had faced and solutions to them.
We continued to think about problems and solutions on our Outdoor Learning Day. We walked around the common and noticed all of the damage the storms had created. The children spotted a lot of fallen down and broken trees and we stopped at each tree to talk about what solutions there could be to help fix the problem. The children came up with lots of brilliant and imaginative ideas which included using the fallen trees to make furniture, using the wood to make fires to create heat for people and some children thought the trees could be used to make toys.
Back in classroom our Role Play area was set up as a Detectives’ office and the children loved using magnifying glasses to help them solve all the classroom mysteries. We also placed our DT table in our Role Play area where the children were able to create their own binoculars to help them with their problem solving. One of the children found some mud on the floor that had fallen out of somebody’s shoes and he used his magnifying glass to look at the pattern of the mud to identify whose shoes it came from. We were very impressed by this creative idea and it was lovely to see everyone working so well together.
During Free Play one of the most popular problem solving activities was our number bingo game where the children spent a long time taking turns to select the numbers before trying to finding the matching quantities on their boards. They also enjoyed exploring letters and sounds with binoculars and experimenting with letter rubbing activities at our Mark-Making table.
We continued exploring our topic book in our Art activity where the children were able to choose a page from the book to then recreate on paper using charcoal. They explored drawing lines and smudging the charcoal to observe the different marks and effects the could make. Once we were finished, we laminated the pictures and then cut them into different pieces to make our own puzzles. This was a great activity to continue our focus on problem solving and we loved trying to work out how to put our pictures back together again!
It was lovely to see the children this week actively discussing ways to solve problems and independently exploring their own problem solving skills during Free Play such as taking turns, communicating their likes and dislikes and expressing their ideas and feelings. It was also amazing to see the children using their imagination and problem solving skills weaved through every Free Play and Focus Time activity.