Autumn Play Dough and Conker Prints

This week the children have been taking in the signs of Autumn. We found a new Horse Chestnut tree not far from our house so the children had great fun collecting the tree's conkers and bringing them home. Today we made some green play dough to explore the texture and patterns of our autumn treasures.

We started of talking about the different colour's we had found and what other colour's reminded us of Autumn. P went on to explain to Little man why the conkers had a green/brown spikey shell. He found this quite interesting and enjoyed feeling the silky cushioning inside the shell. 

Once they were finished examining the conkers and other finds we flatten down the play dough and got playing. Little man pressed the acorns top into the play dough and noted that he was able to make circles with it. 

We looked at the different patterns each of them make and worked out why. We used a variety of ways to describe the makes and textures to help build Little Mans vocabulary. This was a fun little nature experiment to do with the children and it was great to see how Little Man explored the natural materials.