Nursery World - Learning & Development: Activities - Our bright idea

The nursery was buzzing with activity sparked by the children's interest in castles, as Jean Evans hears.

Staff encourage children at Rainbow Nursery, Middlestone Moor, to initiate the direction of their play and learning. After recent investigations into the subjects of light and dark, and the excitement of playing in dark secret spaces, the children's interest in their 'ice castle' hiding place prompted endless questions about castles.

Eager to maximise this new interest, staff obtained pictures of local castles from an internet search. Children were quick to notice that their castle did not have turrets and cone-shaped pinnacles. The walls of local castles, they noticed, were built from large stones arranged in regular patterns. Eagerly they transformed their ice castle with the addition of a few cones and then created grey rectangular stone walls by printing rectangles over the existing walls with grey paint.

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