Welcome back to the second half of the Spring Term! Another very busy time for us with lots of trips and visits and fun plans ahead.

We will be celebrating World Book Day next week by wearing pyjamas for Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday and we will be taking the Moons to the library on Tuesday and the Sun group on Wednesday which will be lovely.

Our planning next week has a lovely literacy focus with fairy tale play outside and exploring books inside, along with circle times that promote a love of reading and stories and some dressing up and role paly too.

This week we have been learning all about growth and change –

Sun and Moon groups – have planted cress and sunflowers, learnt about plant sequencing and life cycles, read books about the garden and how plants grow, frog life cycle and spring yoga and how we grow from being a baby to being old – some very funny conversations about being old and who is old! Two very sweet drawings of me – with grey hair!

The Star group have enjoyed stories about growth such as Jasper’s beanstalk and the Hungry Caterpillar, looked at animal matching cards with the baby animals and parents, enjoyed a butterfly dance and looked at chickens hatching too.

It has been great fun outside, tidying and sorting the garden, planting some bulbs and having a sort out.

Forest School has returned with some nice warm weather and we are so excited that we have two hedgehogs in our little home who are hibernating – and the children could hear them snoring!

We also had a lovely visit from Robot Reg who is a delightful little character who comes along with his lady Rebecca to visit and give a little phonics session – the sessions are great for introducing phonics but are about so much more than that too. It is about meeting new people, learning their rules for the session, being engaged and excited by something new and the children LOVED it! Rebecca was also very complimentary about the children and how they listened and took part and their skills impressed her very much!

Robot Reg will be coming back every Thursday and Friday afternoon for 4 weeks.

Another lovely week at pre-school full of train station role play – in order to help children who may not have seen a train or been to the station we had some lovely books and video’s and some pictures from Tiverton Parkway and London too, along with some nice pictures from trips out from a couple of our families too!

Our play outside has been very much affected by the rain this week but we have tried to go out for most of the sessions, even Forest School on Thursday was able to go ahead albeit with some very serious muddy children afterwards, all part of the fun but the garden needs a little time to recover from the rain so Forest School had a break today and the Moon group enjoyed Sophie’s carefully planned activity inside the Moon room before joining the rest of us in free flow when we were all able to get outside for the whole morning and we had a good clean up of the garden, we started a new tip pile – laid out all the mud kitchen items for the rain to wash over the weekend and organised some new areas for a hopefully, drier week ahead – we are not holding our breath!

Our circle times had a maths focus this week while we work out what the children already know and what we need to help them practice and learn, we have some wonderful observations from the week and it was a real mix of shapes and numbers, lots of fun activities to engage and help us work out what to plan next. Sun and Moons circles included – using big dice and counting the dots, counting beads into tiny colourful pots and matching the numerals too, making a big number line and using shapes to match and create pictures, catching and counting balls with number recognition, singing number songs and the Angry birds game and a feed the animals number game too! Our group leaders are very imaginative!!

The Star group are really great with their maths work too and it is a real focus on creating an enjoyment of maths. They counted and looked at numbers, recognising and matching some, they sung lots of numbers songs and repeating these really helps with learning about counting up and down, they group did some lovely shape matching work and shape exploring work too. Lots of nice observations too.

Next week we are going to focus on “play”- probably sounds a bit silly as that is kind of what we do all the time and teach and learn through play but we are going to make sure that all the children know what is on offer, that we have skilled adults helping them to navigate activities and lead their learning on so we will be keeping it simple and the focus is on the teaching and extending and engaging and helping with new ideas and new vocabulary, helping children to learn English ( we have 14 different languages at pre-school!) and new friendships too.

Have a lovely weekend and see you all next week.

Welcome back to all our families – we have started the Spring term well and the children have settled back in over the course of the week and the week has gone so quickly!!

We have used our circle time to have a little reminder of the rules and boundaries at pre-school and to talk about feelings as well.

Star – the children in the star group had a little catch up after Christmas, they have read books about feelings, played a feelings dice games, matched pictures of feelings and acted out how a feeling feels with movement! They also had a little revisit of some rules here and the star circles really are coming along beautifully – the children are really developing their listening and attention skills and they love the calm at circle times, which means we can make wonderful progress in their learning!

Sun and Moon children have had a Christmas catch up as well. They have also chatted about some rules and reminders and some amazing work has taken place with some really insightful chat from the children about feelings! We took photos of our faces showing different emotions which I will load up onto Tapestry for you to see – some really lovely chat about being shocked, surprised, grumpy and scared – along with happy and sad and angry. We have looked at lots of different scenarios about talked about how we feel in those moments.

Outside we have been getting quite muddy but we have also set up a bike repair shop which has been great for learning new vocabulary and working out how to fix a flat tyre!

We have also had our transient art pieces out making some lovely patterns and pictures together.

In the sun room we have had the babies out for home role play as we have a few new babies that have arrived in our families! We have also been learning about being healthy looking at recipe books, our dentist box and health and body books and puzzles too.

We will start to work on shapes and maths over the coming weeks along with a focus on family and our world – hopefully you have all seen the memo on Tapestry asking for pics from around the world if you have travelled or have family abroad or have lived abroad too!

We have a lot to pack into the Spring Term too – our calendar is very full – Robot Reg will come to visit us, we have tennis coaching, more football sessions to come, Grandparents morning, a trip to the Church for Easter, a story massage session and a visit to the library for World Book Day too!