Summer Term Week 1

Welcome back to all our families and to a new family who have joined us this term having moved to Cullompton.

As we start the summer term we are learning which schools the children have been allocated and starting to think about planning our register for the Autumn Term 2025! Our New Parents Evening will be on Wednesday 4th June so we will be contacting families to book hours in for next year over the coming weeks.

We have returned to a very happy pre-school – the children are rested after their break and we have been tiring them out with lots of pirate play outside which has been really fun and imaginative. We have also had a little tidy up and have explored water play with mini pirate boats and have been searching for home made treasure and making treasure chests as well.

Our overall theme has been pirates to see if this is inspiring the children which it has! Next week we will extend this to support pirate games and activities in circle times with Maths/Numbers as a focus – counting treasure for example! The children have worked together this week to create the ship, come up with ideas for the water play, walked the plank and played new games which involves listening and learning new rules.

Disco Thursday has been replaced by Mindful Thursday and it was an incredible start to the sessions….you could hear a pin drop which is extremely rare at pre-school as you can imagine! I started with breathing exercises to calm, then a technique which involves running your finger along your arm and down and around the fingers on your hand and it was a very lovely moment to see all the children (27!!) watching me and copying my actions and then carefully following my lead in silence! Then I stood on a chair and blew bubbles while the children sat still and allowed them to fall onto their laps or clothes and not leap around to catch them, again they were mesmerised by just sitting and watching and feeling the bubbles and we finished with more slow breathing before starting very quietly to wash hands for lunch. There is a pic of me on the chair in the gallery so do show your children and we would love to hear any comments – it’s a new session so we will see how it goes but a BIG change from singing and dancing to loud music!

Our circle times have had a technology focus, online safety is really important and I would like to direct you to a new section on the website and on Tapestry in Documents for your info. There are so many positives to technology and digital media in our homes and to using devices with and without screens – a couple of rules that we support are that children should not use tablets on their own without supervision, should not access You Tube alone and although it seems very early to think about online safety it is a vital skills for our young people. We will be generating advice sheets and sharing knowledge from training courses that we complete as well to build a set of documents to support this area.

Our circles have been really fun, using the ipad for facetiming parents, chatting to the group in the other room, programming work, looking at remotes and cameras and old phones, making a pretend tablet and choosing apps from a paper app store, talking about what the picture represent and what the app is for, taking photos and videos of each other, printing pics out with a tiny printer, using our Yoto and walkie talkies!

Our Sun table has had a “senses” focus using delicious fruit for taste, mystery smelling jars for smell, different textures and mystery boxes for touch, sounds games for hearing and all of the above for sight!

Next week we will continue the Pirate theme, have a chatter box full of interesting items for the sun table, lots of Maths inside and outside and puzzles and another mindful Thursday session!