What a beautiful couple of days of Spring sunshine! The children have loved being outside and the sun has warmed up over the week!

We started in a little bit of a chilly drizzle on Monday for the annual sponsored bike ride, the children complete 10 laps of the garden path circuit on bikes and scooters and tractors with support from staff and parent helpers! Thank you to everyone who came along to help us. Certificates are being handed out from the office and we are absolutely thrilled with the total that has been pledged so far – should get us what we need to buy a new wobbly bridge we hope!

We have had a brilliant time out at Forest School in the warm sunshine and the photos will be on our Tapestry app for parents on Monday once we have the Friday pics downloaded!

In the Sun room this week we have been enjoying our hairdressers and nail salon, some wonderful imaginative play, and the children are so kind when they are brushing and styling their friends hair and our hair! In the morning on the table we have been looking at numbers and jobs that people do around us which will lead into more learning in this area next week too.

Our circle theme has been shapes for the Star children and they are amazing! We have some brilliant observations and well planned circle and just the right level for the children in the group. Looking for shapes around the room, matching shapes, a shape hunt and shape splat same.

In Sun and Moon we have had a focus on our maths area of learning – talking about routes and where we live, how we get there and distance and describing our homes using shapes and size and that they are next to each other, near-by or behind. We have used Google earth to look at Cullompton and our roads and see how close we may be to friends at pre-school, we went out for a walk and took photos of what we could see and draw a map of our route, lots of other maps and drawings were done in our circle times and making our own houses and learning our addresses too.

Outside we have been practising ball skills all week, playing football and catching, tennis and egg and spoon races to learn co-ordination along with making maps of the garden and following instructions and directions too.

Next week we would love donations of empty fabric softener bottles or power boxes for our role play launderette and if anyone has a mini ironing board to lend us that would be lovely please.

Next week we have a trip to the Church for Easter, last Robot Reg sessions and a week full of circus games outside too.

Welcome back to the second half of the Spring Term! Another very busy time for us with lots of trips and visits and fun plans ahead.

We will be celebrating World Book Day next week by wearing pyjamas for Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday and we will be taking the Moons to the library on Tuesday and the Sun group on Wednesday which will be lovely.

Our planning next week has a lovely literacy focus with fairy tale play outside and exploring books inside, along with circle times that promote a love of reading and stories and some dressing up and role paly too.

This week we have been learning all about growth and change –

Sun and Moon groups – have planted cress and sunflowers, learnt about plant sequencing and life cycles, read books about the garden and how plants grow, frog life cycle and spring yoga and how we grow from being a baby to being old – some very funny conversations about being old and who is old! Two very sweet drawings of me – with grey hair!

The Star group have enjoyed stories about growth such as Jasper’s beanstalk and the Hungry Caterpillar, looked at animal matching cards with the baby animals and parents, enjoyed a butterfly dance and looked at chickens hatching too.

It has been great fun outside, tidying and sorting the garden, planting some bulbs and having a sort out.

Forest School has returned with some nice warm weather and we are so excited that we have two hedgehogs in our little home who are hibernating – and the children could hear them snoring!

We also had a lovely visit from Robot Reg who is a delightful little character who comes along with his lady Rebecca to visit and give a little phonics session – the sessions are great for introducing phonics but are about so much more than that too. It is about meeting new people, learning their rules for the session, being engaged and excited by something new and the children LOVED it! Rebecca was also very complimentary about the children and how they listened and took part and their skills impressed her very much!

Robot Reg will be coming back every Thursday and Friday afternoon for 4 weeks.

Another lovely week at pre-school full of train station role play – in order to help children who may not have seen a train or been to the station we had some lovely books and video’s and some pictures from Tiverton Parkway and London too, along with some nice pictures from trips out from a couple of our families too!

Our play outside has been very much affected by the rain this week but we have tried to go out for most of the sessions, even Forest School on Thursday was able to go ahead albeit with some very serious muddy children afterwards, all part of the fun but the garden needs a little time to recover from the rain so Forest School had a break today and the Moon group enjoyed Sophie’s carefully planned activity inside the Moon room before joining the rest of us in free flow when we were all able to get outside for the whole morning and we had a good clean up of the garden, we started a new tip pile – laid out all the mud kitchen items for the rain to wash over the weekend and organised some new areas for a hopefully, drier week ahead – we are not holding our breath!

Our circle times had a maths focus this week while we work out what the children already know and what we need to help them practice and learn, we have some wonderful observations from the week and it was a real mix of shapes and numbers, lots of fun activities to engage and help us work out what to plan next. Sun and Moons circles included – using big dice and counting the dots, counting beads into tiny colourful pots and matching the numerals too, making a big number line and using shapes to match and create pictures, catching and counting balls with number recognition, singing number songs and the Angry birds game and a feed the animals number game too! Our group leaders are very imaginative!!

The Star group are really great with their maths work too and it is a real focus on creating an enjoyment of maths. They counted and looked at numbers, recognising and matching some, they sung lots of numbers songs and repeating these really helps with learning about counting up and down, they group did some lovely shape matching work and shape exploring work too. Lots of nice observations too.

Next week we are going to focus on “play”- probably sounds a bit silly as that is kind of what we do all the time and teach and learn through play but we are going to make sure that all the children know what is on offer, that we have skilled adults helping them to navigate activities and lead their learning on so we will be keeping it simple and the focus is on the teaching and extending and engaging and helping with new ideas and new vocabulary, helping children to learn English ( we have 14 different languages at pre-school!) and new friendships too.

Have a lovely weekend and see you all next week.