Our highlights of the week were our two Grandparent Mornings! We welcomed 11 grandparents each day and the children really enjoyed themselves and we were able to show the families our circle times and then had a nice cuppa and off for a little explore!

We have been working hard on our physical strength all week and our circle times have been full of laughter and competition and new skills have been acquired.

Star circle – the children have enjoyed lots of music and movement games this week, along with Peppa Pig movement ideas, animal movements and ball skills. Moving over and under hoops, dancing with ribbons and jumping, kicking, rolling and banana banana dancing and dough disco! What a busy week!

Sun and Moon circle – more work on building strength through games such as bean bag challenges, ball passing games, action moves and a brick transporting game carrying heavy buckets! They have learnt how to use the stilts and enjoyed a Forest School session as well in the winter sunshine.

Outside we have been tidying up our bikes, adding new numbers and giving them a clean. We have collected up all our trucks and cars and had a sort out together and built a bike obstacle course and made a train station as well. Lots of lovely vocabulary and play and team work.

Our role play shop has continued this week and the children have really been able to help to tidy it so that it is ready for the next session!

Vet role play has been very popular in the sun room with lots of fantastic language and extending the learning taking place and we have started to look at mini beasts and life cycles very simply ahead of next week when we will be concentrating on it.

Our nurture groups are lovely and we have some great observations from them which really helps the key person with their learning journeys.

Next week is our last week before February Half Term and we will have a garden club outside, more exercise and games and some flower craft inside and life cycle and minibeast topics too. We would love donations of bulbs to plant and some compost please!

We have had a really busy week, enjoying exercise outside which has included football, gross motor bingo, balloon catch and riding the bikes.

Our Costa role play has been lovely and the staff have been able to support that all week, coming up with vocabulary and ideas and helping the children to learnt o take care of the props and take turns and chat to each other and some lovely independent play was able to be developed. We are changing the Costa to a mini supermarket next week and would love a wide range of items to sell – empty packaging, lots of different kinds of boxes, any packaging with different languages on would be brilliant and any interesting foods from around the world would be good too. No glass please and nothing with food inside or anything that did have nuts inside but a range of boxes and packets would be brilliant.

Inside we have enjoyed science week on the sun table! Lots of experiments and exploring the concepts of gravity and weight, floating and sinking, making volcanoes and if you have a look at our facebook you will see one experiment that really didn’t work! During our planning session we found “Biro leaves” – it is a perfect example of Pinterest vs real life!! Luckily it is an important skill to be able to make a mistake, try and solve a problem and manage our feelings when something goes wrong and even more luckily all our staff a great role models!!

Our circle times have had a focus on shapes, we are working on next steps for the children and ideas for home learning for areas too and will be sharing these after our key person meeting on Monday evening. Writing observations and sharing information really helps each staff member work out where a child is developmentally and where we can go next – either as a challenge for them or an area for nurture.

The Sun and Moons have enjoyed a shape hunt outside, played shape bingo, matched and sorted 2 D shapes, explored shapes within shapes for a matching pairs game, made 2 D shapes from lollipops, played a shape stepping stone game, completed a task to match all the shapes on a shape bus and played a shape monster sorting game too!

Forest School has been a bit damp but enjoyable this week and the Suns and Moons have settled into the new pattern really well. The children love to take turns to light the fire and Sophie had lots of lovely child led role play observations – 3 girls turned the willow dome into a stables for their ponies and unicorns, a group made a restaurant from the mud kitchen and another set up a food delivery service using the wheel barrow – delivering mud cup cakes to Sophie and Louise!

The Star group have also had a busy week, they have separated out for a few circles to ensure that all children are getting the right level of support to learn and sometimes being in a smaller group benefits them from a concentration perspective. Group leaders are planning carefully and circle supports will be making more observations too. The Stars have played matching the shape games, a shape corner game, made simple houses using shapes and matched different bricks on a big sheet of paper too -some lovely photos from the week!

Next week we are going to be junk modelling so donations of boxes and toilet rolls, tape and string would be lovely please and we will be concentrating on phonics and letters and sounds in our circle times in Sun and Moon and on music and dance and songs and rhymes in Star.

Have a lovely weekend – Amelia

Not long until our Christmas party and performance and we look forward to welcoming you to St Andrew’s Church next Wednesday – don’t forget that pre-school will be CLOSED for the whole day and all staff will be at the Community Centre so please telephone 07927057415 or text if you have any questions – we won’t have wraparound care available that day either as we will be moving scenery into and then out of the church for the performances.

We have had quite a quiet week due to lots of illnesses so we hope everyone gets better soon.

The sun room has been smelling amazing this week as we have had some wonderful sensory trays filled with ginger and hot chocolate and our festive cafe was selling salt dough donuts that we had made and lots of yummy little wooden cakes and macarons! We have had Christmas supermarket magazines out as well, reading the recipes together and deciding what looked yummy.

We have enjoyed a few dough disco sessions on the sun table to help build arm and hand strength and the children have loved playing with the small world set of our Happy Land toys. We will keep those out for next week as well.

Circle times have had a festive theme with lots of games of Christmas Bingo, chatting about Elves on a shelf and counting games, decorating gingerbread men, a card matching games, decoration making, cutting snowflakes, making snow man pictures and following a pattern of lights with pom poms. For the children who are in the performance we have been dressing up and taking some photos for the slideshow that we have in the Church while you are all coming in to be seated.

We will also take photos of the children before the performance at the party and when they are dressed up to share on the parent gallery. Quite a few children have been off this week so have missed having their pictures taken.

We are having a week of cooking next week with some things to bring home hopefully, we will be making ice sensory trays and outside we are planning to have lots of active fun with balloons and bubbles and our mud kitchen.

Have a lovely weekend and we will look forward to sharing our special Christmas party day with the families and children who are attending.