Book of the week: What Hunts in the Arctic by The Clever Factory.
Synopsis: Beware! Wild & dangerous creatures abound in their native habitats. Watch them travel into your world & discover what makes these beasts the most feared & fearsome alive!
Main Activity: Ice sculptures. To make our ice sculptures we used whatever resources we had lying around which happened to be some rubber gloves. We started by filling them with things we found on a scavenger hunt around the church grounds. These included leaves, twigs, stones and anything else small enough to put inside the gloves. Once we had our items inside the gloves we filled them with water. We then put in various colours of food dye and tied some string around the end of the gloves to stop the water from seeping out and also to enable us to hang them up. We tied them onto a tree and left them hanging there in the hope that it was cold enough to turn them from a liquid (water) into a solid (ice). After they had frozen, we removed the outer gloves and were left with some quite unique and unusual looking ice sculptures.
Additional Activities:
Sledge rides. One of our parents very kindly let us borrow a wooden sledge for the children to play with. We went into the main church grounds and the children took turns being pulled around on the sledge (which was also great exercise for the practitioners and kept us warm)
Snowball fight. No need to say anything else about this apart from it was fabulous fun! (the practitioners seemed to come off far worse than the children)
Snow angels. We went to the front door of the church where the snow lay untouched, laid down and moved our arms and legs in and out to create snow angels
Snowman. All the children helped to make our snowman which actually ended up as a snow spider!?
Playing with ice. We found some big sheets of ice on our pond and on top of the tarps which the children played and experimented with