New ladies have arrived!! We are thrilled to announce that we have 3 new ladies joining our team here to support the children. We have Zoe who is very experienced and qualified and will take on key children and work in all areas of our provision and Beth and Misbah – both have children at our preschool and join us as lunchtime assistants and will also support children curing free flow and activities and story time. We are really pleased to welcome them and know that they will all be really popular with the children here and will support team in a professional way.

Our new children who joined in January have settled in and are learning the routines really well and taking part in circle times too.

Sun and Moon – have had a focus on life cycles and growth and change this week with some fantastic activities to support learning and turn taking and they have also been working on fine motor strength, playing games and working hard as teams and individually to complete challenges.

Star group – have also learnt about life cycles and created some amazing art work and completed activities to support strength. Being physically strong and co-ordinated is absolutely linked to learning and writing and concentration and the Star group enjoyed using the tweezers to pick up small items and work with a partner to complete the challenges, they used claves and playdoh as well to build co-ordination and strength. Lots of singing and a focus on the caterpillar/butterfly life cycle worked really well for them.

In our free flow we are working on understanding questions, talking about why and how and using science to inspire the children to ask questions. The process is the important part bot the end result as we all tend to discover when our lava lamps don’t work or we run out of vinegar half way through making raisins dance! It all teaches the children that resilience, carrying on after a mistake and even making mistakes are all fine and can be overcome.

Potions, mini beasts, bikes, construction outside, shaving foam concrete, cards and roads and gutters and balls and litter picking, moving tyres, making a table and finger gym all complete a lovely week.

Next week we are learning about and celebrating Chinese New Year and Valentines Day before we finish for a half term break and we will be half way through our academic year! Our committee have set up a Valentines Colouring Competition with a lovely prize of a teddy and chocolates and nice pens so please enter with a sheet available from the office for £1! Thank you

Happy New Year to all our families! We hope that you had a happy Christmas and New Year period and the children have settled straight back into our routines and are happy and busy and playing beautifully!

The Spring term is a lovely time for us here at pre-school, we look forward and learn about growth and change, we look at the world around us and explore nature and touch on topics such as health and wellbeing, exercise, sleep, teeth and illness and we learn about how to be healthy too.

We will have a focus on Maths – shapes and numbers and patterns for January and lots of physical development and exercise and activity in free flow play and circle times daily too.

We also run lots of nurture groups and this half term we have groups of 2 or 3 children at a time working on friendships, confidence, physical development, emotions and “wanderers” – these are children that need a little extra adult support when out and about in free flow – free flow is from 10.15 – 11.35 and this can be a busy time and some children find it hard to decide what to play with when there is so much on offer so a guiding hand and gentle help supports them to make choices and learn how to play with friends or how to play with a particular activity that they may have never seen before. Our groups change based on the individual children’s needs each half term.

Our circle times this week have been a lovely welcome back and chats about Christmas presents!

Stars have been mark making, drawing presents which helps them to learn that marks have meaning, they have also looked at their names along our literacy theme and used pretty counters to follow the line of the first letter of their name, helping them to recognise it. They have sorted fruit and veg using real items to bring that to life and learnt about body awareness, singing head shoulders knees and toes and listening to their heart rate after running! We have had the soft play out in the star room during the rainy sessions and this has been brilliant, the children waited so well for their turns and did a great job of taking their shoes off and on.

Sun and Moon groups have also created some wonderful pictures of Christmas presents too! Their skills at representing objects in drawings are really developing well. The groups have enjoyed talking about Christmas, and about being healthy and talking about exercise. We have also explored lunch boxes looking for fruit and we are learning about a different food group each week over this half term. At lunchtimes we will be making a tally chart together, looking at who has which fruit, then which dairy product etc over the half term and I will share these charts on the whiteboard in Reception so please point them out to the children when you are in the queue and take the chance to count and talk about the foods on the list.

As a charity money is very very tight for us this year with rising costs, we know all families are feeling the rise in the cost of living but if anyone could possibly make donations of the following we would be so grateful – bird feeders and bird food (NUT FREE please) and rice and pasta and vinegar and cereals and for the activities next week we would love compost, bulbs, food colouring, flour and bicarb please.

Sun group are enjoying Forest School on a Thursday and the Moon group on a Friday this half term and this week they have reminded each other of the rules and how to be safe and the children have been acting out the Bear Hunt story.

We have wrapped up warm this week while playing outside in our wonderful sleigh and gingerbread house! We did hope for some snow flurries on Thursday but sadly nothing appeared from the cloudy sky!

Forest School sessions began inside for a while for the craft activity (amazing little owls!) and then moved outside to enjoy the fire and snack time and the garden.

Robot Reg has been to visit for his last session this term – he is such a huge hit with the children and he will be back in the summer term for a new set of sessions, we will hope to be able to afford 6 sessions in the summer so let’s fundraise as much as we can over the year!

Preparations are underway for our performance on the 12th December and all families should have the final information – you are welcome to bring grandparents along with you to the Church and we look forward to welcoming you all.

We have been decorating the trees in each room with the children and very kindly we have received a big donation of decorations with a wonderful light up little town and lots of individual donations from parents too – a big thank you!

We hope that you have all enjoyed your parent consultations and looking at the learning journeys, they will fill up over the year ahead and become treasured memories we hope for you and your family. We feel we know the children really well after this first term and have great ideas of where to go next with their learning, with your information from home and next steps handed out we have lots of new plans for January already!

The learning focus has been maths this week and lots of the circle times have given us some great observations. The children are making good progress in this area and we will revisit this in January.

Star group – working hard on patterns and matching patterns, counting dots and singing number songs, they have made some lovely Christmas trees counting out the pom poms and enjoyed singing number songs and using shapes to make Christmas trees too.

The Sun and Moon group have been learning about recognising numbers, matching numerals to quantity and counting out the right number of items for each numeral. We have learnt about 2D and 3D shapes and made tally charts, matched and organised and counted Christmas decorations and played a Christmas sound matching game.

Our free flow Christmas post office has been full on children mark making and talking all week and we have been persevering to complete Christmas puzzles and now it is the 1st December the Christmas tunes have started!

Next week we are going to be setting up lots of Christmas craft for the children to make to bring home and Christmas stories in our cosy gingerbread house and wrapping station. The sun room will have Christmas cooking activities and gingerbread playdoh too.