Children from reception and year one engage their imaginations and make magic potions using our Potions and Concoctions Outdoor Mixing Kit. To make sure their potions work, their teacher, Paige Farley, provides them with a whole host of natural ingredients.
The children eagerly waiting to find out what their lesson will involve.
The excitement when they were told they would be making potions was lovely and can be seen here in the accompanying video.
Magical Ingredients!
Their teacher had been busy collecting a variety of natural, magical ingredients which really helped to spark the imaginations of the children. The ingredients really helped to add to the magical atmosphere that was building.
These magical ingredients formed the base of the children’s’ magic potions.
The children also access to water and selection of flowers so that they could use the petal and leaves. The sensory experience here was excellent. So many textures and smells, it provided a great environment for discussion and building on some cultural capital in terms of the materials they were able to experience. You can get your hands on some of them here:
Unicorn horns (Shells)
Crocodile eyes (Gem stones)
Dinosaur Footprints (Leaves)
Tears of a Fairy (Bio-Glitter)
Record your potion for future use!
Next the children were shown how to record their potion recipe so others can use it in future. Their teacher created this nifty worksheet to support this, you can use it too!
Use this sheet to help the children record their magic potion ingredients and methods.
Once the writing was completed, it was time to make some magic! It was here that the sensory experience really got going with petal picking, the rubbing and smelling of the rosemary horse tails and trying to keep the power of the unicorn horns under control! Mixing with the wooden spoons also provided different experiences, depending on what ingredients the children had included.
Mixing feels differently depending on the ingredients and size of your spoon!
Magical maths and science!
Writing down the ingredients and considering how much of each ingredient the children wanted to use, provided opportunity to discuss amounts, capacity and types of measuring. Then of course they carried out the actual counting as they collected and added their ingredients. In addition to this, some of the children discovered pumpkins float. There was much disbelief at first because pumpkins are really heavy. (I have to admit that at first I was surprised until I remembered pumpkins are mostly full of air in the middle). However, this provided an opportunity to discuss what floats, what doesn’t and why. Science in the field!
Unfortunately, none of the children made a ‘tidy up’ potion. They did at least enjoy the activity and learned lots. You can use the lesson with your children too, here’s the activity plan:
Try this with your children. Change and adapt as needed!
View our selection of potion stations here.
This article was written by our Social Media and Content Manager, Katie Addison, (former Subject Leader of English), in collaboration with Paige Farley, Year 1 teacher at Crich Infant School in Derbyshire.
