We hope the children have enjoyed their week, we have been exercising our socks off! Lots of brilliant games and activities during circle times and play outside. We have been playing jumping beans, an exercise game where we roll the dice for different activities, yoga and we have made a big spider web, crawling and climbing over the string! Balancing, obstacle courses, co-ordination and using a straw to blow little plastics balls along a shute – lots of bending over and hard work chasing and collecting the balls.

Outside we have had a garage and bike repair centre, a car wash and we have had the bikes out all week with new registration plates on them to support looking at letters and numbers while washing and riding the bikes. there have been some muddy puddles to splash in and our mud kitchen is looking very inviting as well.

Inside we have been enjoying wedding role play, lots of beautiful photos and pretend weddings, banquets and food choices, flowers and even a real wedding dress!

We have had 3 mornings on Mini Forest School – Tues/Wed and Friday and the children absolutely love these sessions. The Stars continue with them until the half term and then the Sun and Moon children go back into the sessions.

Robot Reg has come to visit again this week and the Moon group loved their walk up to the Church, and loved exploring St.Andrews and chatting all the way there and back!

Our caterpillars are growing well and the Sun room is in the lead with 3 chrysalises formed already. Our sun table has been home to mini beast trays, butterfly craft, sorting the worms colour game and our mini beast Understanding the World box. Alongside that we have been developing our painting provision – moving the easel inside so that we can help the children more easily, support them to choose colours and paint their picture and then we can ensure it is named and kept safe ready to go home.

Next week we are CLOSED on Monday, and when we are all back on Tuesday we will be playing castles and knights in the garden, hairdressers inside (this group of children love role play!), learning how to use scissors and tools and lots of mark making too.

We are very close to completing our Walk the Moon challenge with 92% of the total walked! Well done all – a nice long bank holiday walk from you all should get us to our target – the challenge finishes at the end of the month for national Walk to School day!

Have a lovely long weekend.

A very wet end to our week but we have made it outside most mornings and afternoons and these are some of the happy moments and activities that I spotted going on!

Easter sensory trays, imaginative ball games, boys creating challenge in their play, pretend cooking, “the floor is lava” game, tractor ride – turn taking, little corners with children chatting, practising with walking on stilts!

We have been out on a few spontaneous walks as well, this week we had chance to go to the river with a group and we had a wonderful walk to the fairy garden.

We added the total miles (12!) to our Walk the Moon target which is now at 1242 with 917 to go – we have raised £280 so far so please keep donating and walking and recording the total miles!

Our Easter craft mornings were a great success and we really enjoyed having you all come in and take part in the craft and Easter egg hunt with your children, they really love to have someone here with them and we may do something similar in the summer term as well so keep an eye on your emails!

Important date for next term is our Summer Fete – Saturday 22nd June!

We do have a few trips and experiences over the coming summer term and we do need walkers to help us so please ask grandparents if they would be able to help us out with coming along to the Church or to have milkshake at the leisure centre please, we know it is hard to help us when you are working.

We wish you all a very Happy Easter holiday and look forward to welcoming you all back for the summer term.

World Book day is such a lovely celebration of the world of books, we read all the time here at pre-school and reading to your child at bedtime every night is a really good way of supporting their learning, nice quite time together snuggled up and talking about the book as well as reading the story really helps children to settle down for a nice sleep. There is a brilliant website called Tiny, Happy People from the BBC with loads of advice on all sorts of topics and worries and activities.

Baby and toddler bedtime routine: Top tips for parents – BBC Tiny Happy People

World Book Day – BBC

The Moon group had a trip to the library on Thursday afternoon and loved reading books there before coming back to pre-school to play. We have had our story sacks out each morning and the children have been acting out the Billy Goats Gruff story on our own wobbly bridge!

Circle times have had a focus for learning about jobs, people who keep us safe and people who help us and we have welcomed Pauline in for a visit who is the lollipop lady from St Andrews. She is very good to us and pops down with her lollipop stick and hats and coats for the children to dress up in and stays for a while for a play in the garden, directing the children on the bikes and talking about road safety. We are also hoping to welcome a parent in the Royal Navy to talk about his work and the ship he works on, the local community police, Lisa from Tesco and a fire fighter. If anyone reading this has any contacts or would like to come in and share their work we would love to hear from you – any kind of work is interesting to us, not just the high profile high vis 999 professions.

We have been looking at the vehicles people need for their work, talking about jobs and work our families do, using posters and mini figures, toys and videos as well.

The Star children have used lots of different hats to learn about jobs, looked at emergency vehicles, watched a video of lots of different vehicles at work and matched equipment to jobs as well.

We have enjoyed vet role play inside, had lots of different transport toys out and outside we have been playing shops, using the role play to talk about size and pattern and money and counting and turn taking. Our fossil area has been popular too and we will leave this out for the children to now explore on their own having modelled the play and drawn maps, hunted for frozen dino eggs, used hammers, made fossils and bones, we are now leaving that as a child led area with all the equipment they need to enjoy the play with their new vocabulary.

Forest School has been a delight again this week as always, really wonderful sessions in the back garden with Sophie and Jackie.