Exploring with natural materials
Materials and instruments found during this time of year, such as ornaments, pinecones, leaves, and pumpkins, are great tools to explore.
At Bambinos, we don’t just teach our children how to learn; we teach them how to love learning! We do this by creating a safe space full of wonder and imagination where every child feels welcome, supported, challenged but most importantly, loved. We have been welcoming our new children, establishing relationships with each other, and learning about our environment. As we get to know and trust one another, we are discovering interests to help us project future learning experiences for each child.
Children are born with an insatiable curiosity for learning. But as they get older, it becomes harder to keep up that curiosity. That curiosity can be kept ignited in each child through an environment where children can explore their minds and bodies through play, music, art, and science. Our curriculum emerges from children, engaging them in hands-on activities that strengthen their cognitive skills while also building confidence and self-esteem. Fine motor skills are an essential part of development and include all those activities that involve precision, a high level of hand-eye coordination, controlled movement, and concentration. Mastery of fine motor skills are essential for the acquisition of certain skills, such as writing, and subsequent learning.
To help prepare our children for their future writing endeavours, we engage them in meaningful age-appropriate activities to help them develop their upper body, shoulder, arm, finger, and wrist muscles through activities such as painting on vertical services, scooping, and pouring sand and water, interacting with playdough and using tweezers to pick up small objects. All these motor activities help to lay the foundation for a good pencil grasp in the future.
A lot of dialogue and thinking goes behind the choices in materials that we make available to children - we see materials as tools for learning and discovery. They are treasures for the children to explore as they choose presented with an air of wonder. The wider the range of possibilities we offer children, the more intense will be their motivations and the richer their experiences and opportunities to actively use their senses as they explore their world through sensory play experiences, which is crucial to brain development.
Materials and instruments found during this time of year, such as ornaments, pinecones, leaves, and pumpkins are great tools to explore different textures, sizes, weights, colours, shapes, scents, sounds, taste the most unexpected findings are always the ones that cause the most excitement. Sensory proposals allow our children to awaken curiosity, enabling them to make discoveries using previous knowledge to make connections.
Sara Richards, Bambinos