text: The educators at our Currawong Early Childhood Service are loving seeing children and families again now that lockdown has lifted.
  As a dual celebration of children returning to the service and Children’s Week 2021, the Currawong team organised a wide range of fun and educational experiences for the children.
  The babies loved getting messy during sensory play experiences! They started with rainbow spaghetti, which helped develop their knowledge of colours as the educators identified and named individual hues. The children also had the opportunity to build their sense of touch by using their whole bodies to explore the spaghetti. The educators also encouraged them to smell the spaghetti to develop their sense of smell.
  Then winter came to Currawong as the babies and educators played with shaving foam. They clapped their hands, and the foam exploded and fell like snowflakes. The educators used this opportunity to build the babies’ language skills, engaging them in conversation by asking questions like: “Is the foam soft?”, “Can you touch the foam?” and “Can you smell the foam?”
  Sensory play is an important part of child development in the earlyyears. If you want some activities you can do at home, check out this ABC article.
  In older rooms, the Currawong team set up a science experiment to develop the children’s knowledge of colours, with children using their fine motor skills to add drops of food colouring into milk. The children were mesmerised as the colours gradually spread in the milk, and many exclamations of ‘Wow!’ were heard.
  As an extension of this activity, the educators added detergent into the mixture. The children were amazed to see that the colours ran away from the detergent and disappeared. This was certainly a crowd pleaser, with the children crying, “Again! Again!”. The team was all too happy to oblige and took this opportunity to explore and talk with the children about the patterns they saw in the mixture.