Habitats & Animals with Reception Class

                      

My daughter's Reception class has a lovely outdoor area and I noticed that they had a couple of tuff trays in it so I offered to come in and set up an activity for the children in them and I am delighted that they said yes as it was a wonderful morning!

Reception are having a visit from a mobile farm next week so I thought I'd tie in with that. I set up a habitat in each tray - a seaside scene in one and a farmyard in the other. I did use a stone mat underneath the farmyard when I tested it out at home but because the school tray was green I didn't think it needed it.

  

I drew sea creatures and farmyard animals on stones with permanent markers and wrote their names on the back of the stones. 

 

The animals were hidden around the outdoor area for the children to find. When they found one, they ticked the animal off the list (the names on the back of the stones helped the children find them on the list) and then put it in the right tub - the farmer's wheelbarrow if it lived on a farm and the seaside bucket if it lived in the sea. 

 

Once the children had found all the animals they split themselves between the two habitats, put the animals in the tray and had a play. The two reception classes came out in four separate groups so about 15 children at a time. I asked the first group to hide the animals again ready for the next group, which in hindsight was a mistake as they were veeeery good at hiding them and a few pigs and fish were never found again, so I re-hid them myself for the remaining groups. The children will no doubt be delighted when they stumble upon the errant animals in weeks to come though!!

   

The children got so engrossed with the activity, there was much excitement when they found a stone and they loved the sensory play of the seaside tray and the small world play of the farmyard tray.

I was a little concerned that the trays would be a real mess for the third and fourth groups (I'm not precious about my creations but I wanted all the children to have a chance to play with them!) but thankfully they were surprisingly quick and easy to tidy up...

                    

The farmyard had a bit of runaway 'soil' that was hard to put back in the vegetable patches but the rest was easy to tidy up between groups...

                    

...and the seaside contents got pretty sand-coated but I managed to divide up the seaweed and sand and get a good proportion of the water beads out of the sand. The water beads, shells and buckets were re-added to this tray after a rinse of water to remove the sand.

Here's how I made the two habitats -

Seaside Tray

                                                        

The base pvc liner was from Dunelm. They sell pvc on a roll - a 1 metre by 1 metre piece cost less than £4 and is more than big enough to cut to size for a tuff tray.

                                    

The seaweed was cooked linguine! After cooking I rinsed it under cold water to remove the starch, added gel food colouring, stirred it well and spread it out on a baking tray to dry.

 

I bought a condiment set of 4 mini buckets from the pound shop and put stickers over the condiment names to make 2 seaside buckets and 2 buckets for collecting vegetables on the farm. I used slightly damp sand so that they could build sandcastles with the mini buckets and added shells along the edge. 

  

Finally I added some water beads in the middle. I wasn't sure how all these different textures would work together and nearly left one of them out but I'm really glad I didn't. The water beads did get coated in sand but the children still really enjoyed the texture of them and the sand rinsed off them easily.

                          

Farmyard Tray

The farmyard was more time consuming to prepare but I was really pleased with how it turned out. And there was lots of recycling involved which is always a bonus for me!

                                      

The barn and the hen house were both made out of Easter egg boxes. I turned them inside out, glued them with my glue gun (any excuse to use this, I've recently purchased it for £8 from Amazon and I'm like a kid in a candy store!) and then painted them brown. I cut a door into the barn and used a Maltesers Easter egg insert as the roof, which I left unattached to make it easier for the children to move the animals in and out.

                                       

I cut an entrance to the hen house too and glued a strip of cardboard to it as the ramp for the hens to walk up. I picked up some shredded paper to fill both of them, plus some little nests, in the post-Easter sales for 50p each. It was a little windy today so the shredded paper had the added bonus of hiding some rocks underneath so that the cardboard structures didn't blow over!

  

I already had some free samples of astro-turf (my backyard will become a no-maintenance little oasis one day!!) so I used these for the fields. I added fences made out of cardboard cereal boxes to a couple of them and made some horse jumps to go on the other - these were already in this shape, they were inserts that divided up a box of easter craft goodies, but they would be easy enough to cut and fold yourself from a piece of cardboard.

I cut slots in three strips of cardboard and slotted them together then filled with shredded paper to make the pig pen.

   

The vegetable plots were my favourite bit of the farm! I used a couple of boxes destined for the recycling bin and filled them with very out of date coffee that my husband's office was throwing out. It was a lovely texture and held the vegetables upright perfectly, plus the children had great fun sniffing it and guessing what it was!

 

The carrots and radishes were stickers from a big pack of Easter stickers I bought for 10p on Easter Monday! I coloured the leaves and the backing paper and stuck one over the condiment writing on the mini buckets mentioned earlier. They looked great and the kids had so much fun pulling up the veggies and then planting them again.

                                                   

Finally, the trees were pine cones painted green stuck into a tree trunk of brown play dough which made them stand up.

  

I had so much fun with my daughter and her classmates this morning but came home absolutely exhausted - I have so much respect for teachers, educating our children in an engaging way day in day out. They definitely earn their Friday night glass/bottle of wine!