Messy Play Monday: Pumpkin Play!

It's that time of year when shops are filled with spooky costumes and pumpkins. Many of the children have shown an interest in all things Halloween so we have tapped into that this week with some pumpkin messy play!

The children used tweezers to try to extract the seeds and stringy insides from the pumpkin, not only was this great fun but the tweezer use improves muscle strength in the hands and their dexterity and there was lots of interesting and unusual language involved as they talked about what they were doing.

Messy play is a great time to help develop children's vocabulary. We do this by listening to what they are saying and modelling new language so when a child says "This feels funny" we can help give them words to describe the textures by including those words in our conversation for example introducing words such as smooth, slimy, hard etc...