Stay and Play with the Mini Rangers

After being asked to set up a stay and play group by the Etherow Country Park visitors centre I wondered what would parents find the most useful.  There are many groups that provide wonderful activities for young children, but what could I offer that would benefit the children around me. So we started off with a meeting place and a walk around the park.  This was lovely, but for some children the undertaking was enormous and could have been done with just their carers and probably was being done often enough.  I thought that if we were going to offer something it had to be something tangible to do with unveiling the mysteries of introducing phonics.

For the first terms sessions I didn't touch Phonics as there is sometimes a fear of teaching young children and I really didn't want to alienate the wonderful parents, what I really wanted to put into place was experiences.  So to start with I used activities like feeding the ducks, following duck prints, planting seeds, grass heads, clay sculptures using sticks, flowers and leaves, blackberry painting to introduce children to the outdoor experiences that leave children with a token of their time to reflect on when they return home. These activities were lovely and watching the children I could see that they needed more than this I needed to put something purposeful learning behind it.  This led me to develop my sound box!

It also meant that we took ownership of the Etherow Country Park's learning area, I roped in a few helpers an ex ranger Steve who worked at Etherow Country Park until his retirement and my loyal and creative husband and together we created a central meeting point:

This means that we have somewhere sheltered to meet up and discuss keeping safe, it is where we talk, read our stories and show our objects that correlate to our sounds. We have also created a bug hotel:

A Den making area hidden under a bush, to give children somewhere to squirrel away safely in, but also so it is out of the way of passers by:

We have also introduced a mud kitchen and we have started to provide a drink and a snack to all our participants.

The group is well attended by a lovely mix of childminders, parents, grandparents and nannies and everyone is welcome.  Last week we had two lovely volunteers who assisted in mud pie making and drink and snack serving.  

The hope is that we introduce all these lovely people to the joys of early phonics which includes listening to the noises in the environment, attaching a sound to a picture in the same way we attach a sound to a picture of an animal.  Add Jolly phonic actions to each sound and tie the whole thing up with a fun relaxed morning.