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We’ve been busy today exploring playdough, flowers and seeds.  This is an activity I planned as part of the seed planting and growing we will be doing over the next few months.  I say planned, but my planning only amounted to supplying an interesting selection of resources related to seeds and growing and allowing the children to take explore them as they wished. I knew the areas of learning applicable to each child’s stage of development that I hoped to cover within the activity, but whether these were actually covered, depended on the direction the children chose to take the activity in.

As soon as the table was set up ready, they got straight to work!

Initially they focused their attention on adding the artificial flowers to their playdough.

Carefully adding one flower at at time and pushing it into the dough.

Sometimes using the mini flower pots.

K decided to use the flower pots in a different way, poking the flower stems through the holes in the underside of the pots!

R, observing K’s exploration, decided this was a pretty good idea and joined in!

These two then progressed to exploring the dough and seeds.

 Rolling the dough…

…and pushing the seeds deep into it.

E was also interested in combining the seeds and dough.

 Initially, she was content to explore the feel of the seeds…

….scooping handfuls and observing as she let the seeds fall through her fingers.

She also experimented with pushing the pots into the dough…

…filling the pots with seeds…

…and repeatedly stacking and un-stacking the pots.

In the meantime, R and K, had discovered that they could make the petals move by blowing on them.  (They have been really interested in the fans lately)

K pushed his flower into the dough and both K and R noticed that it slowly fell over.

They then found that if they blew on the flower it fell over quicker!