In January's learning story read about a snowman building contest with two groups assisted by Jess and Mary. When we had another snowfall, Mary and a small group of children built a snow fort. As the rain came and with the warmer temperatures, the children watched as their snow fort and snowmen melted. This then gave Mary and Jess the idea of building a fort without snow. A big enough fort that everyone could sit in.
With the warmer weather, and a lot of mud in the playground. We brought out toys for our mud kitchen, where Theo talked about how he likes drinking hot chocolate on colder days. Theo and Jess then pretended to make hot chocolate using the mud. “Mm mm, yummy," Theo said smiling while offering some to Jess.
On February 2, Jess surprised the children with the making real hot chocolate that we would drink outside in the cold. Jack, Alex, Stefan, Theo, Kinga, and Stéphane all took turns pouring in the ingredients and whisking everything together in a large bowl. We then poured our hot chocolate into a thermos, which kept it warm for when we went outside.
When we got outside, the children quickly gathered where we had previously made our snow fort. Leena looked around and noticed, “There’s no snow." Mary asked, “What happened?” The children responded, “It melted!” We then asked the children what could we use instead to make a fort. Alex found rope that we had set out as a provocation, and said we could use that. Mary asked, "will the rope cover us all up?" The response was, “Yes.” Mary held Alex up to place the rope on the post and Jess asked the children to go under it. This is where they discovered the rope did not cover us all up like we thought.
Looking around, the children discovered the tarp Jess had brought outside as a provocation. “A blanket," Emily said, “We could use that." The children started unfolding the tarp and raised it above their heads. Many of the children gathered underneath, smiling and giggling with excitement. Together, with the help of their educators, they stretched the tarp over the large log posts in our playground.
Alex picked up the rope and we talked about how we could use the rope to secure everything in place. Alex thread it through the first hole and handed it over to Emily for a turn. Emily used her eye-hand coordination to thread the rope from one hole to the next. Mary then tied the end pieces to the post, securing our fort in place.
Once our fort was completed, the children gathered around inside the fort and waited for Jess to pour them some of the hot chocolate we had made earlier.
