This week our preschool children have been fully immersed in the magical world of Hansel and Gretel. Through a range of creative, hands-on activities, they explored the story, its characters, and its enchanting gingerbread house in ways that sparked imagination, language, and early maths skills.
The children loved using playdough and small loose parts to design and build their very own gingerbread houses. They carefully selected beads, buttons, sticks, and gems to decorate their creations, showing fantastic fine motor control and creativity.
Working together, the class also produced a large-scale collaborative painting of the gingerbread house. This colourful artwork allowed them to experiment with paint, mix colours, and talk about the details they remembered from the story.
In our tuff tray, the children used prompts and props to retell the story of Hansel and Gretel, building confidence in sequencing and storytelling.
The children have also been practising their early maths skills. Using gummy bear picture cards, they explored subitizing and number composition, recognising small quantities and discovering how numbers can be made in different ways.
To extend their mark-making, the children drew their own gingerbread houses and enjoyed drawing the witch’s house on whiteboards, adding spooky details and sharing ideas about what might be inside.
Outdoors, the children worked together with great enthusiasm to build the witch’s house using large building blocks. They experimented with size, shape, balance, and teamwork as they constructed tall towers, doorways, and imaginative features inspired by the story.
Our fairy tale costumes were a huge hit too. The children loved dressing up and acting out their favourite fairy tales, bringing stories to life through role play, movement, and expressive language.
It has been a magical week of storytelling, creativity, and learning. We are so proud of everything the children have achieved.