For the past week, the whole of Reception has been enjoying Splash Day 2018.
Dressed in their very finest swimwear, all the children had loads of fun playing at each water station. These featured waterwheels and pumps alongside buckets, squeezy squirters and a much-used hose. There were sandpits and spades, too, plus tricycles and tyres filled with bowls of water.
Children stomped in the bowls, splashed themselves and each other with cups of water, buried their legs in the sand, rode the trikes through puddles, and even splashed their teachers! Our photographer got a soaking too!
Splash Day 2018 was tremendous fun and the hot weather here has been perfect for it. It also served a purpose because playing in the water and sand can help children develop in many ways. These include:
Coordination and fine motor skills
Pumping water to fill buckets, taking aim to splash each other, and digging into sand with spades and forks all require manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination.
Exploring and learning
Water displacement, flow, volume, density and gravity alongside sand/water mixtures and textures are some of the things that children can observe, investigate and understand. Sand play in particular is beneficial for developing a sense of textures, especially on their skin. Children also enhance their proprioception – the sense of their body relative to space – by burying themselves in the sand.
Social and communication development
Water play enables interaction and engagement with each other, which was clearly demonstrated today and last week when the children shared the water toys, communicated their discoveries, and formed alliances and goals in order to get their teachers well and truly involved (and extremely wet!).