Welcome to all our new and returning families, it has been a pleasure to welcome you all and to settle the children in! They are amazing!

We are so proud of how they have settled in and I know there are a few tears but these soon stop once we have a cuddle and start to play and they have made so much progress already, learning the routine and the environment, joining in with circle time and singing and exploring and making friends. The Star children from last year are settling into their new Sun and Moon groups, making friends and enjoying being back.

As a staff team we are thrilled with the groups and will be working hard to get to know all the children, seeing what progress they make and building relationships with you all.

We start the new year with simple and relaxing activities, collage, painting, car play, bikes and home corner, some family role play, stories and singing, lunchtime routines and having snack. The helps to settle the children as we have lots of time to sit with them and help them explore. We start to listen in to their interests and write observations to help with our planning. Next week we are going to use jobs as a theme as the children really liked playing with the cars and other vehicles so think this will be really fun – starting with building a fire engine outside for role play and we will also have dressing up inside with a theatre and music, dancing and singing so let us know of any favourite movies or songs!

Your key person will be in touch via Tapestry so let us know if you have any issues with the app or logging in and accidents and other observations and memo’s will come out regularly.

We hope you are all feeling more settled after a whole week if you have new children starting and we look forward to a great year ahead.

We have started to welcome our new children to pre-school with session visits happening! This is a really exciting time for us and for the new families – and the current cohort are always super nosy, coming to say hello!

We have been learning about animals this week as the lovely Marie from Animals 2 U is coming on Friday this week and Thursday next week for the school starter groups. This is a lovely experience and a real treat for the children. We will load the photos onto Tapestry for you to see after each visit.

Outside we have had our lovely home corner and the mud kitchen out! Lots of very muddy children who have had a wonderful time making mud pies!

Our circle times have been based on learning about our world – with a focus on taking care of the planet and the animals and habitats that exist on it.

The star group have been making an ocean habitat, sorting animals into land, sea and ice habitats, making animal sensory trays and singing lots of animal songs and animal boogie dancing!

The Sun and Moons have drawn animals and habitats, looked up different animals and learnt about which live in the rainforest and which live on plains, they have watched a few videos of animals in their habitats, sorted them and also learnt about weather and there are some lovely videos of weather forecasting on Tapestry!

There will be fewer photos this week and next I’m afraid as we finish the special books for the school starters and have those ready for graduation.

We have also been reading some fairy tales, created some lovely animal craft including lions and turtles, panda’s and parrots!

Next week we will continue to learn about our world, adding in all the areas of learning – we will learn about the planet, dance around the world, music around the world, food and stories and communities and animals!

We had a very eventful start to our week with our Ofsted Inspection! Flo was lovely and thank you to everyone who chatted to her in the queue and send in messages and comments on Tapestry, we felt very proud indeed reading what you had written and listening to Flo when she gave us her feedback at the end of a very long day! We have to wait until the report is published which can take up to 30 working days which is a long time! We hope to have a draft report through in 18 working days and we will be looking forward to reading Flo’s comments.

A busy week with home visits and school stay and play sessions and we will be talking to the children about moving to Primary School now, we don’t start that too early as it can be unsettling as it is such a long time until September! This week we will be talking about lots of skills we need for school in our circle times.

We enjoyed our Costa role play working on building fine and gross motor strength and confidence to use new vocab and role play.

On the astro we laid out a lovely new musical play area – a new idea where we explore sounds with the children, copying and matching and repeating the sounds they make and use different items to make music such as junk modelling and blocks and large drums!

We also spent our circle times learning about the caterpillar and butterfly life cycle with lots of different activities and looking at our caterpillars – they are growing very quickly!

Our theatre role play inside was amazing too, some incredible performances and dancing, I will try and find some to load onto Tapestry for you to see as the children loved being recorded and watching themselves afterwards! Lots of independence with dressing up and finding shoes and putting the clothes away at the end of each session.