Dinosaurs and fossils, stories and songs, maps and directions and routes, frozen eggs, treasure hunts, swing and climbing frame, disco Thursday and Robot Reg, dino tails, dino feet – just a few of the happy moments and learning activities this week!

What a busy and fun week!

We welcomed Alfie to lead our football coaching session which was a great start to our week – the children really enjoyed his sessions and he is back again on Wednesday next week for more football fun!

Our circle times in Star – working on size language and understanding concepts – lots of activities to sort big and little items, heavy and light items, which items are long or short and containers that are full or empty, how tall are you and what floats and sinks! Brilliant week – lots of learning through fun activities which are carefully planned by the group leaders for each group.

Our Sun and Moon groups – working on patterns and routes, directions and journeys are a pattern, looking at buildings and shops and houses are all part of a journey. We have drawn maps of our town and of our pre-school garden, looked at our favourite places on Google Earth as well. Making and copying patterns is a good skills within the maths area of learning – the groups have made 2 colour patterns, spotted and matched Easter eggs with different patterns.

Outside we have been hunting for fossils, looking for dinosaurs, playing dinosaurs games with tails and feet and lots more dinosaur craft inside on the Sun table.

Forest School sessions have enjoyed some spring sunshine with some hammering and sawing skills this week and lots of lovely team work and collaborative play in our wonderful back garden.

Next week we will be setting up a shop inside to support more maths and literacy and role pay to enjoy and would love donations of old hats, shoes and jewellery please and any old coins – it would be lovely to play with real coins instead of the plastic ones.

We will also have a visit from Tiny Travels who are a company that specialise in teaching children about the diverse world around us, they provide an interactive cultural experience and we have used fundraising money to pay for this session.

Tiny Travels | Cultural Education Sessions

We also have two Grandparents afternoons on Thursday and Friday which we are looking forward to!

Our pre-school world has been full of mini beasts this week! We have been learning about a different one each day on the sun table, making factsheets and have had lots of lovely new books to go alongside – books that focus on snails and slugs and worms and we have made our own wormery with 10 real worms!  Our stick insect babies are growing well and they are off for a holiday with one of our families for half term.

Outside we have been tidying and gardening and planning what we will plant for the next half term, we have also been  playing lots of fun games, washing all our mud kitchen items and sorting our sand boxes together to promote taking care of the kit we have. We have also planted a builders tray full of grass seed so are hoping when we return after half term that we will have a lovely mini meadow of grass that we can use for play!

Inside we have also been looking at flowers and plants and used fragrant herbs in the playdoh.

We have loved the physical challenges and exercise of the last couple of weeks and this week we have moved onto fine motor strength based activities in circle times.

Sun and Moon – have used tweezers to pick up lots of little items such as pom poms, practised cutting skills and played lots of arm and hand games such as a version of hungry hippos (hopefully you will work out what this is from the photos on the gallery!) tiddlywinks, lollipop stick building for accuracy and sorting games and playdough monster games!

Stars – have had a brilliant week enjoying fine motor trays, using little tweezers, painting over chalk shapes with tiny brushes, making crowns with little gems, making bird feeders by threading cheerios onto a pipe cleaner and finger gym and snipping activities.

We are so looking forward to coming back after a nice half term rest – lots going on in the next half term! Grandparents afternoon tea, Robot Reg is coming back to visit to support phonics work, Alfie is coming back to run a couple of football sessions for the children, we also have Tiny Travels coming in for a session to support our work on learning about the world and our families and where we all come from!

We also have our sponsored bike ride in March and a library trip for World Book Day and we would love volunteers to help us on this trip please – parents and grandparents are very welcome!

Forest School have enjoyed their sessions, Thursday was cold but dry and Friday was really wet but very fun – exploring natural crafts and flower crowns, enjoying their snack outside around the fire with Sophie and Louise C.

We hope you all have a wonderful half term break and that all the bugs that are around disappear and every can come back healthy and well.

Our focus this week has been literacy and Disco Thursday has made a return! The children love to dance and move and this builds confidence and strength. We had a lovely email last week from one of the local schools praising the children who started last September and letting us know the gross motor strength and co-ordination are key skills so we will be working hard on those areas over the coming months for all children.

Our planning has included exploring technology this week and sensory play in the afternoons, we have made a new letter tray each morning and the children have made some wonderful junk modelling creations which built on our teaching last week. They are an excellent group for playing and creating and sharing ideas and working together.

The Stars have been learning new rhymes and songs and moving lots and dancing and enjoying playing instruments. We have lots of lovely observations for them this week for the key workers.

The Sun and Moons have been working hard on recognising letters and listening to their sounds and this is the beginnings of them understanding letters make up words that can be read and sounded out. Pen grip is really important for writing so when you are at home making lists or drawing please correct your child’s pen grip – I will load a photo of a good pen grip onto Tapestry for you to have a look at!

The activities have included drawing and writing letters for our little Cully Bear, matching items to letter sounds, recognising the letter and the beginning of their name and being able to sound it out. Matching sounds to letters and writing those letters and using ideas from an old friend Robot Reg in our circle times.

Shared story reading is a really valuable tool for promoting language and literacy and a great time for promoting new vocabulary. We read every lunchtime and every afternoon, often repeating favourite books and talking about the stories too.

We have set up a multi cultural shop undercover which has kept us entertained on the rainy days and we would love more packaging for the shop please, ideally from around the world!

To promote exercise we have played games in the garden, and enjoyed garden club – digging and tidying our growing garden this week.

Next week we will be learning about Chinese New Year and trying lots of different foods from around the world, thank you for the donations from our families and if you have any other ideas for snack time from your homes and cultures for us we would love to hear them! amelia@cullomptonpreschool.org

Please keep an eye out for notifications from Tapestry – please do ensure you have those turned on as your key person has chosen the area for home learning/next steps for this half term and these will all come via the Tapestry app as an observation. We would love your feedback on the idea and any photos of you playing with your child using our ideas!