It's elementary

Area of learning

Creative development

Learning intention

Respond in a variety of ways to what children see, hear, smell, touch and feel

As autumn slips into winter, children's observation of changing weather conditions can be used to stimulate creative activities. All the senses can be employed to investigate natural elements that should be collected for investigation in the nursery.

1 Ice

Three-year-olds love water play where they can experiment at their own pace. Playing with water is non-threatening and they have time to imitate and observe their peers. Well-timed intervention by adults will help children describe their experiences and extend their scientific understanding. For this activity, provide ice for the water tray that has been prepared in a variety of ways:

Ordinary ice cubes Ice frozen in tied rubber gloves that will appear like fingers Ice frozen in half-full translucent plastic bottles (never put full bottles in the freezer!) Coloured ice (add food colouring) frozen in tied plastic bags * Give the children the ice shapes, still in the containers in which they have been frozen, to put in tepid water in a tray. The ice shapes will melt at different rates, depending on their density.

* Generate as much interest and communication as possible as the children watch and feel the ice melting.

* Suggest they remove the containers and mix the melting ice with the water.

* Introduce new vocabulary to broaden knowledge and language.

* Ask questions to encourage the children to think about former experiences of ice and to describe the feel and appearance of ice as it melts.

2 Water

On rainy days, encourage children to observe rain on the window panes. Help them to create a similar effect on paper.

* Use large pieces of strong wallpaper.

* Fill squeezy bottles with a mix of water and powder paint to create a runny consistency.

* Provide shallow trays with sponges soaked in water.

* Ask the children to experiment by sponging the surface of the paper with clear water, squirting the paint across the top of the flat paper, then gently lifting the paper so that the coloured paint runs down.

* Suggest experimenting in similar ways with other colours. This will be a messy activity but great fun, and each painting will be individual to the artist.

* Support language development by prompting with questions.

* Ask the children to observe the way they spread the water over the paper and how the colours appear stronger or paler depending on the amount of paint used.

3 Snow

* Encourage children to observe the changes in deciduous trees in winter as their leaves fall and skeletal structure emerges. Organise a finger-painting activity that creates the appearance of snow-covered trees in winter.

* Encourage children to choose two shades of brown powder paint from a range of autumn colours that they can take themselves from large containers and put into small pots on a cleared table in front of them.

* Provide water in squeezy bottles, and squeezy bottles of washing-up liquid.

* Encourage the children to squirt water and washing-up liquid on to the table, add a little powder paint, then mix the liquids and powder together with their hands, spreading the mixture over the table. They can vary the consistency as they like by adding more paint or water.

* Suggest new vocabulary to describe the varying textures of the paint.

* Suggest painting marks with their fingertips, for the effect of skeletal trees.

* Take a print of their paintings by pressing a sheet of paper over the surface of the painted table.

* Pick up the paper to reveal the mirror image of their tabletop picture.

* On the paper, the edges of the tree trunks and branches will be brown and the inner sections will be white, where the finger marks have displaced the paint on the table.

4 Snowflakes

If it snows, have the children investigate snowflakes and create their own. Provide magnifying glasses with which to observe snow on windowpanes. This needs a steady hand and patience to focus on identifying the flakes' shapes.

* Provide different types of white paper (tissue, kitchen, writing, crepe), scissors, PVA glue and spreaders and large sheets of contrasting coloured tissue paper.

* Ask the children to fold their paper into quarters and to cut out and remove small pieces of paper. When unfolded, the snowflakes will be revealed.

* Get the children to spread the glue over a large piece of coloured tissue and place their snowflakes on this gluey surface and press another sheet of tissue paper over the first one.

* Leave to dry overnight. The glue will strengthen the tissue paper, making it like plastic, and the snowflakes will be caught inside this new material.

* Display the finished pictures on the windows so that the light shines through them and they resemble stained glass.

* There will be lots of new vocabulary to introduce as the children describe their individually designed snowflakes and compare them to real ones.

Series guide

* This series aims to demonstrate the type of activity practitioners should provide to help children of different experiences progress towards a given goal, ie stepping stone 4.

* The stepping stones are not age related, though it is likely that activities in stepping stone 1 will be best suited to three-year-olds, with later activities suitable for progressively older children. However, practitioners must bear in mind that children come to early years settings with different experiences, interests and abilities and will progress in different ways towards a given goal.