The children are interested in writing, and I want to be able to give them different experiences where writing and play weave together - and also other learning elements and discoveries...
I put a clear plastic box on the overhead and then put a mix of lentils and coloured rice into the box. The idea was to be able to draw and create shapes in the lentils. I loved the colour and the texture, but it was just not really working to create light shapes - you really need to swoosh your finger round and round to make it defined... and when you tried to make details the gaps soon filled up with lentils again.
So then I tried some coloured salt (light blue and mixed with some glitter - the glitter though does stock to fingers, which I found a bit irritating later in the day as I picked bits out - and no matter how I washed my hands (which was very many times as I got quite messy with papiermaché later on) there was still bits of glitter.... but I guess that is glitter for you.
Only a very thin layer of salt was needed to make the wall black - and it was very easy to write and draw in - of course there is that great surprise that it is upside down on the image on the wall.
With a slight shake you could even the salt out and start again. it did require a bit of technique in wrist action to get it evenly across the base of the box though...
A child (age 3) came in to watch what I was doing... just after I had drawn a circle and a triangle... the child exclaimed that it looked like roads...
Then he started to play - creating roads and parking houses(apologies for the filming... my focus was on the child and not on the filming quality)
and then he started to write words - making symbols and sounding them out... and then he started to count...
The child looked at the wall more than at what his hands were doing.
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