Approaching the castle from the back.

View from the hill behind Craigmillar Castle.

The castle is quite impressive since many internal bits are still intact…

…like this stairwell.

This pigeon scared me when I suddenly found myself eye to eye with it as I walked up the stairs.

Craigmillar Castle

This photo was taken during a visit to Germany this summer.

We used watercolour paper which is rather thick, so that the paper wouldn’t break. The children loved using their hands and brushes as well as different textured rollers with a huge bowl of shaving foam. We painted for almost 45 minutes and everyone joined in, just because it was different.

The beauty of the activity was that we could repaint on top of previously painted shaving foam to draw different patterns. The finished paintings had a great 3D effect and the patterns painted dried up clearly visible. The clean up was much easier because the shaving foam did not stain their hands like paint would have.

We will definitely repeat the activity next week.

Taken with my D3100 at Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian.

One of our staff, a trained actor, showed us some ideas on doing drama with children. He works mainly with children over 3, so we had to adapt his ideas to work with slightly younger children. After doing some research I found the idea to introduce children to pantomime, so I worked on a plan, how to induct the older children into this topic. I tried it yesterday with a group of children between 2 and 3 and it has worked quite well, so I thought I’d share my lesson plan.

Firstly I need to explain that I work in a setting that uses the Montessori approach, so the children are very much used to doing things independently and listening to each other.

Firstly I invited the children to join my group and to take a chair and carry it to the separate classroom and start a semi circle.

After the children arrived and had arranged their chairs I explained them what we are about to learn about and set out the requirements (listening carefully, taking turns etc.). It works very well if children have their own chair to sit on, rather than sitting on the floor, since they have their own allocated spot and it stops them from getting up. If things get out of hand you can also invite them simply to sit back down on their own chair.

I introduced the children to the word “Drama” first. I asked them to share their experiences about cinema, theatre, movies and television. I gained their interest by getting everyone to share something that they have seen or heard of. One girl explained that she had been to the theatre to see “The tiger who came for tea”. When everyone had shared their ideas, I came back to “the tiger”. I asked the children if they think that it was a real tiger in the theatre and whether they think real tigers can talk and we all agreed at the end that it was someone “pretending” to be a tiger, to tell a story.

After this first step we had linked the words “drama” and “pretending”. I then referred to things we had done in the past such as our nativity play and showed them how we were pretending to be someone else.

Next I introduced the word “pantomime”. I gave everyone a turn to practise saying the word and we all had a laugh. Some children said that this is a very long or difficult word. Then I went on to explain what “pantomime” is, always keeping it simple: “When we do pantomime, we show things to people without using our voice. We use our bodies and faces.” Of course, always showing surprise and huge interest!

I had to think of  a way to visualise the idea of “switching our voice off”, so I invented a magic button behind our ear, that turns our voice off. I show them that when I press the button, I can still “talk” but there is no noise. Then I invited every child to the front to show us how they can use the magic button that switches their voice off. We all had a turn and a good laugh.

Generally I would have stopped the first lesson here.

BUT our children were very interested and their concentration was still good, so I continued on.

If you do stop here just continue on another day with recapturing the thoughts about drama, pretending and pantomime as well as the magic button.

We then took turns to show different animals to our friends of course without using our voice. So I invited the children to the front one by one and reminded them to push the magic button and show us an animal without using our voice. They did great and the other children were involved in guessing what animal it is.

Then we discussed some emotions. I showed them how I was feeling and they them showed each other how someone might be feeling, again without using their voice. We talked about being happy, being sad, surprised and angry.

Then their concentration faded, so we recapped and moved on to something else.

Overall we spent almost 45 minutes involved in this activity, which is unusual. I would keep the general introduction to about 20 minutes in particular with this age group.

Try it out with your children, they will surely enjoy it. I will repeat this activity next week until the children reliably get to the stage of knowing what it means NOT to use our voice, but our body. Let me know how it goes if you try it and feel free to share your ideas on topics!

Taken somewhere in Edinburgh.

Edit: Taken in Leith, behind the Ocean Terminal, next to the Royal Yacht Britannia.

Taken this summer in Edinburgh.

Feeling a bit grumpy today since it’s finally time to head back to work. We are waiting for OFSTED any day now, so it’ll be a busy few days for us. Fingers crossed its not going to be today!