Create and Play at Goldfinch June/July 2025

We started the term with midsummer forest-making, creating forest collages, 3D trees and large-scale forest paintings! Our tuff trays became home to enchanted woods and grasslands!

Roses were our next nature focus, with rose stencils, flower painting, potion-making, rose ice-blocks and sieving out mini summer flowers. Then the lizards came out, with lizard cutting and painting and creating rocks from bubble wrap, paint sticks and coloured tape. Children experimented with wool wrapping, making snakes and lizards from pipe cleaners, multi coloured yarn and googly eyes to great effect! 

With the rain and the sun making an appearance in June, it was time for rainbows. We had a huge variety of materials to choose from to create rainbow collages and rainbow wands and danced along with these to rainbow songs. Children could also experiment with paint colour mixing in one tuff tray, and search for mini rainbows, objects of the sky and coloured treasure in the other.

In July, our focus shifted to the seaside, with turtles created using hexagonal plates for shells and a range of paper and card. Bales of puppet turtles were made using sticks and 3D circle bodies and children could explore our tuff tray rock pool.

We then moved onto making sail boats from sponges and brightly decorated sails, which were played with in our mini boating lake! Playdough was used to explore the patterns of shells and marine life. Inspired by the book ‘Rainbow fish’, shiny, multi-coloured fish were made with string, foil and pens. Before we left for the summer children created their own summer games, spinners and beautifully decorated kites!