Welcome to the summer term at Pre-School! We hope everyone had a lovely Easter break and we were really excited to see you all again after the holidays!

We have lots to look forward to this term, our annual Hungry Caterpillar picnic party in our back garden, our summer fete, trips to the church and the milk shed, a teddy bears picnic at the CCA fields and lots of fun and learning during normal sessions too! Lots of skills to practice before moving to primary school and the Star groups will enjoy mini Forest School, learning the rules and developing their independence ahead of their sessions as Suns and Moons next year.

This has been such a fun week, full of laughter and learning – the photos are lovely – I am sure the sunshine helps!

Our team have come back refreshed and thrown themselves into our pirate theme, using treasure maps outside, generating real excitement in their searches for treasure, we have made our own coins and treasure chests, built a pirate ship with a plank to walk on and a secret cove under a sail to explore. We have also had the water out in the sunshine with our solar fountains which are so pretty and mesmerise the children

Our other theme has been “questions” – talking about “What – Why – How” – lots of learning about technology.

The group leaders have been very inventive and we have had some brilliant circle times this week – we have also been talking about how to be safe online – to always use kids tube and not you tube, not to use a table or phone unsupervised and not to take technology to bed – a story read from a book is better than watching an ipad in bed. There are some scary statistics about young children accessing inappropriate content online when using a table or smart phone so please be careful.

Star – learning about technology – using our toy mobile phones, looking at the ipad and finding funny photos and videos, using our toy metal detectors and searching for metal treasure, remote controlled car races, printing photos from a phone on a tiny printer and using a laptop to send me an email and then I sent a reply! Then the stars made their own play laptops – fantastic vocabulary and language and concentration and turn taking with the fun tech toys!

Sun and Moon – this groups have used the ipad to facetime Mandy in the office and one of the parents in each of the group, they used Michelle’s tiny printer and took photos of themselves and then watched them be printed immediately, the groups used our programmable robots – Beebot and the pretend mobile phones. They learnt about different clocks, analogue and digital and talked about time and made their own watches and also emailed me from Andrea’s circle time and I replied!

Robot Reg came to visit on Thursday and Friday afternoons and the children were so happy to see Rebecca and Robot Reg! Bringing learning phonic sounds to a new fun level!

Our caterpillars have arrived and we will be taking care of them over the coming weeks.

We will also be learning about our senses on the Sun table next week and would love donations of balloons, jam jars with lids, plastic cups and foil, exotic fruits and scented candles please.

We are so grateful for all the fundraising you have been doing! The Bingo total was fantastic and the sponsored bike ride is looking like the very best year ever – total due soon! Thank you – it really means a lot to us and means we can buy equipment and toys and resources this term which will really benefit all of the children.

We had a few visitors this week which has been really fun and created a lovely buzz around pre-school. PCSO’s Kevin and Carrie came to visit on Tuesday morning and brought lots of dressing up and stickers and colouring and most importantly a Police Van, with fully functioning lights and sirens! We had a few looks from people shopping across the road when the siren went off outside pre-school, we really had a wonderful time with them both – lots of chat about the radio’s and handcuffs, the baton and the cell inside the van. The most important message is that the police are there to help us and keep us safe and Kevin and Carrie were so kind and lovely – thank you both! We also welcomed Lisa from Tesco who played shops with the children and will be coming back on the 25th March to run an Easter Egg hunt for us – thank you to Lisa, she is a brilliant community champion and has helped us many times over the years. We will be welcoming Markus this afternoon who is in the Royal Navy and the children will really enjoy listening to his descriptions of his ship and looking at his smart uniform and learning about his job too.

Our week has been so busy with our visitors and our play and learning – we have made a pizza oven and restaurant outside, using real herbs and pretend ingredients and this has been a really popular activity.

Our outside play has been based around the circus and fairground games – we have flaming hoops, hoopla, skittles, splat the rat and more fun to be had next week as well as we build in more ideas to the outside play.

Learning about feelings is really important so this has been a theme for the week when children come in first thing and we have set out lots of puzzles too as this group of children really enjoy completing them, working hard and independently to find the pieces and making them fit.

The Forest School photos are wonderful – please do have a look on the gallery – the sessions are an absolute delight, the children play beautifully, guided by Sophie and Jackie and play together – using the resources and coming up with their own ideas, alongside the activity that our lovely Forest School ladies have set up.

Circle times have been really busy – we hope you are enjoying the new whiteboard with a snapshot of the day on it for some info for you to help build conversation with your child about their day.

Sun and Moon – colour changing science, colour mixing, Ramadan and work on 3 D shapes (this will continue next week as well)

Stars – colour mixing, Ramadan, shapes and colour and colour changing experiments.

Next week we will continue the circus/fairground theme, we will be learning about shaped 3D and 2D and sensory play outside. We have Easter craft and train journeys inside with a table laid out with lots of photos of Cullompton to prompt lovely chatter, please send me photos if you are out and about at the weekend of our town so that I can print them off!

Welcome back after half term to all our families, we hope you all had a happy and lovely half term break.

The children are pleased to be back and have had a really good week – a few tears are common after a break from the routine but everyone has settled back in and busy in their pre-school day! We have spent the week talking about being special and about people that we love and that are special to us and we have a really wonderful group of children who are really happy to talk about people being special to them and were delighted to know that they were also special to all of us, the ladies who are their teachers here at pre-school. They have drawn pictures of their family and of us, talked about what makes them special and it has been really heart warming to see who they choose to draw from the team at pre-school! To top it all off they are also brilliant at mark making!! There are some photos on our facebook page of a few of the pictures that they made.

The weather was lovely for the first few days and we enjoyed making music outside and then even though it has been rainy we have still managed some fun outside all kitted out in our waterproof clothes. We are sorry for the very muddy clothes and children but we try to make the most of all the weather – filling puddles with washing up liquid and paint!

Our Forest School groups have swapped so the Moons take part on a Thursday and the Sun’s on the Friday for this half term and then the Stars have a turn for a few weeks in the Summer Term.

Circle times have been based around literacy and “Being Special” and we have talked about our names being special, who chose those names and the children always find it funny to think that we are all Mummies too with children and a home outside of preschool!

Our explorers zone has been created outside and there are fossils and tools and an amazing cabin to play in!

We hope you all have a lovely weekend and next week we will be looking at animals and their habitats, those who live in a zoo or protected environment and we will carry on with our explorers theme outside too.