Autumn Term Week 6
Pre-school has come alive with the beautiful Autumn colours this week, we have been looking at leaves and conkers and colours and natural items, making art work and talking about seasons. The children have bags to collect items over the weekend to bring in for us to explore and feel and smell and touch and we will keep this theme running for another week – adding in Halloween as well. Sensory play is really important for children and we have loved all that Autumn can offer us for this area.
I took the Sun group to St Andrew’s Church on Thursday to talk about Harvest and to experience the organ and climbing the pulpit! We are very lucky and Carrie is incredibly welcoming and the children were really awed by the size of the church and we also loved the drone footage on the screen at the back of the church. This group were the noisiest organ players so far in my whole 9 years! I wonder if the Moons will be as loud next Friday! Thank you to everyone for helping walk with us, it is really great for the children to get out and about and they walked beautifully, chatting all the way and looking out for dog poo of course!
Our sun and moon circles have been concentrating on literacy and books this week and we have been working hard to see how much the children remember about a story, can they tell is back to us, can they remember which characters were in the book and can they act it out? It is really important for children to be read to and to enjoy a story, we will be asking you to bring in their favourite books after half term as well so chat to your child about which one they might choose! We have read Dear Zoo and made a story window with that one and the Gruffalo as well, we have acted out Goldilocks with lots of laugher at how cheeky our puppet Goldilocks was, we read Day Monkey/Night Monkey and made beautiful pictures for Going on a Bear Hunt. Next week we are focusing on listening and attention skills in our groups.
The Star children are amazing, so settled and come into the Star room in the morning for their small group time when they hear the shaker! The photos of such little children enjoying an activity together are so lovely and they are really playing with the older children out in the garden too – some of the Sun and Moon children that were here last year sometimes try to sneak back into the Star room for circle time! The stars have been learning to listen to instructions and follow them, understanding actions and pictures and copying, enjoying a teddy bears picnic and practising prepositions – putting the teddy on the box, next to or behind! We have been checking their understanding levels too and collecting ideas about what areas we need to focus on next.
Outside has been a brilliant place as always at pre-school, lots of police station role play – pretend handcuffs, a jail and catching baddies – the baddies are pretty terrible! They have stolen my lunch, money from pre-school, eaten all the biscuits and keep escaping from the jail! Hearing all the laughter and shrieking has been brilliant and so joyful!
We hope you all have a great weekend collecting Autumn treasures and next week is the last week before half term when we are closed.