Welcome back after the half term break – we hope you all had a happy and healthy week off. We are back into preschool life – full of Bonfire Night chat, stories from home and learning about space. We use the themes or subject as an umbrella to teach our curriculum – the themes are the HOW and the curriculum is the WHAT – this means we use our imaginations and creativity to plan activities and games and circles and outside play and choose WHAT areas we need to teach because we know where children are with progress and this gives us the WHY!

We are always coming up with new ideas and listen to the children carefully about their interests, while also stretching their experiences and range of knowledge to help us provide lots to engage them.

This week using space as a theme, we have enjoyed role play (making friends, communication skills and turn taking), building a big rocket outside (physical development and planning how to do it and what we need), creating a space control centre (communication, maths, new ideas, technology) and decorating our area with crafts and planets and non fiction books (literacy, creative work, colour, new vocab).

We have also had a literacy focus too – while we are getting to know the children we often write observations to help us see the areas of strength and an area to focus on – we may need more observations or that child may need time away from the larger groups to share what they know.

In our circle times this week :-

Star – took part in firework arts and conversation, learnt a planet song and enjoyed “Whatever Next” the story about a bear who goes off to Space. The Star group have made their own space display and watched a rocket launch too. Covering literacy with story sacks Gingerbread Man and Billy Goats Gruff – also making their own gingerbread men.

Sun and Moon groups – acted out a space adventure story, being astronauts landing on the moon, making up the story as we go and sharing ideas in our groups. The children have been so focused on creating name rockets, recognising letters in their names, looking at space books and the space question book, making space stations from Lego after looking at the ISS photos. They have played letter bingo and were amazing at that and watched and learnt a solar system song and made a rocket and planets.

We will be continuing our space play next week, more literacy work and mark making and we would love donations of the following items – Glass jars with lids, cotton wool balls, foil (we will recycle the foil) and big plastic water bottles and some big cardboard if possible please?

Forest School groups have now swapped so the Moons go on a Thursday and Suns on a Friday. Another wonderful session today with new children taking part for the first time.

Next week we will be learning about the important work that the charity Children in Need do, we keep it simple and talk about how Pudsey keeps children safe and helps children who are unwell. We will be following the Children In Need theme and will be dressing up in pink or spotty clothes and would love to see any children dressed up too! You do not need to buy anything, we will be ready to offer spotty Pudsey face paint in the morning and we will be playing games all day and dancing away.

Our theme this week has been exploring Autumn and learning about where our food comes from and cooking and baking and creating and tasting! Outside we have been working on our physical development with good balance needed for the obstacle courses we have been building and enjoying our Monday football with Alfie.

Forest School has been bathed in Autumn sunshine and the children wrap up warm in our waterproofs and spend the morning in the garden, lighting the fire, having snack and learning how to use tools safely this week, sawing wooden discs and using the hand drill.

We took two groups up to St Andrews Church to meet the new Family worker Darren and to see Ed, our vicar and they looked after us very well indeed – even providing the very special treat of party rings for snack time! We always head off quickly after the snack before the sugar rush hits! The children behaved beautifully and walked very carefully up to the Church, listened to instructions and explored the church. We talked about where our food comes from and at the end of our trip we had a look at the food bank. We collect food from Tesco and Aldi and make up bags for families in our setting to collect. We have also been incredibly lucky to be awarded a grant from Aldi to buy food to create our own foodbank to top up the donations we collect with fresh items and more store cupboard items too.

Our circle times have had an Autumn focus and the Star group are creating their own Autumn display. The children have been painting with leaves they have collected, made hand print leaves, decorated autumn leaves and have been out in the garden collecting more leaves. The group have also explored pumpkins, made trees for Autumn and talked about leaves falling down, hibernating animals, made hedgehogs and enjoyed tree printing – what a fun filled week of learning!

The Sun and Moon groups have also talked about Autumn as a season, they have made sun catchers which are now on the windows in each room looking lovely, been out of pre-school on a mini autumn walk to collect leaves and talk about the colours and learnt a new song about Autumn. They have made clay hedgehogs, adding spines and snouts and working the clay into a ball which is good for hand strength. The groups have played a Scarecrow game with Michelle (A bit like What’s the time Mr Wolf) and made scarecrow shape pictures, talked about harvest and where our food comes from and played pass the pumpkin!

During free flow we have used salt dough to make cafe style items for our roleplay next week, made smoothies, pretend cakes, played with oranges/lemons/limes as a sensory tray and got messy with gloop and foam and custard powder!

Next week we will be enjoying more exercise outside, maths with an autumn theme, dough disco on the sun table in the morning and learning about healthy habits and some cafe role play too with some lovely wooden new toys from Aldi!

We have had a wonderful week creating our own Disney land! Lots of dressing up, chatter, singing and dancing, games and crafts and our own Disney castle outside in our garden. The children have really enjoyed talking to us about their favourite films and characters. We have posted lots of photos of the activities from our week on facebook and we will be collecting consent forms so that we can share group photos from our session on our Tapestry news feed.

We have been mark making outside, chalk on the stones, painting the fence, large scale painting on long rolls of paper using big and small brushes and mud painting.

Our circle times have been Disney themed as well and we pop lots of learning opportunities into our planning so that the children make progress but within themes and activities that they find really exciting and fun.

The Sun and Moon group have learnt some new games – Frozen Tag, Hulk Hero mission and What’s the time Woody!, they have also talked about favourite films, created their own superhero’s, make Rapunzel plaits with salt dough, spotted and glued down missing pieces from Rapunzel pictures, lots of colouring, Disney Bingo and Frozen I Spy, built Disney houses and made Mickey Mouse biscuits.

The Star group has played a Disney dance and freeze game, done some pom pom painting for Mickey mouse, made king and queen crowns, built towers for Rapunzel and made Disney “Up” balloon pictures. The star circle is quite short while we work on building up concentration and learning the routines and then we go into our snack time before going outside.

Next week we will carry on our Disney wonderland with more dressing up, a Disney cafe outside with fairground games in the garden.

Inside we will be playing some maths games to inform where the children are with those skills so that we can work on areas together, we will also be having Story Sacks out which are bags full of props for each story which really helps with listening and attention skills. We have added in some construction on the carpet as well as this is an area that the children are showing a real interest in.

We would love donations of the following items to help with our planning as we are a charity and funds are tight! Food colouring, pots of dried herbs and cinnamon and ground ginger please. Thank you!