What a wonderful end to our very Christmassy week with the lovely Christmas parties and performances! The children were amazing and we loved every moment – we hope you enjoyed coming to watch as well! Our week was rather wet at first but we persevered …
Our week started with a wonderful visit to the Culm Valley Care home on Monday morning with the sun group – the children really enjoyed the time they spent there with the residents and we also took the opportunity to sing some of our Christmas …
We have enjoyed a lovely week at pre-school, building our listening skills through a variety of games and activities.
This is an important area for us to ensure the children are secure in because it is the foundation of all the other areas of learning, we are working on focus, listening to instructions and following them while being able to concentrate on short tasks. We do encourage parents to ensure screen time is low before coming into pre-school as new research shows some children will have difficulties adjusting from screens to settings and the shift of attention can cause a dopameine drop resulting in some dysregulation. Lots more reading to do on this and the amazing Royal Foundation, led by the Princess of Wales has a really interesting article – link below.
The Power of Human Connection in a Distracted World – Centre for Early Childhood
We have some good info on our Tapestry documents section about online safety and screen use, positives and negatives and will add more info from new research.
Our circle times have also had a focus on listening skills, using music and instruments to engage and promote following actions and instructions. We have danced and used a metronome to copy a beat and rhythm, we have matched instruments and played them quickly and slowly and loudly and quietly – all really good activities to play and we will revisit those on the carpet next week as well.
Outside we had a group treasure hunt experience – our aim was to involve every child on a short ten minute group activity to search for a number of items and then complete the task to earn a group reward, we were looking for children who found it hard to concentrate so that we could support them to re-engage. It went so well and we searched for 45 bricks in our building site disaster hunt, 65 dinosaurs, 54 alphabet hunt and lots of other games – rewards included having all the bikes out, balloons for everyone and bubbles too!
We have started to build our Christmas Coffee Shop – SnowBucks, promoting writing and chatting, ideas for cafe role play and fine motor skills.
In our sun room during free flow we have had a wonderful Christmas post office, lots of mark making and chatting about gifts and food and being on the good list came up a few times! Stories about seeing Santa already and lovely letters to Santa as well.
Christmas has even crept into our Forest School sessions with some really pretty natural tree decorations, Forest school is going so well and the children really benefit from the atmosphere and the outdoor learning opportunities.
Here are two of the songs that we would love you to practice at home!
Christmas lights
Twinkle twinkle Christmas lights
Lighting up December nights
Red and yellow, orange, and blue
Making such a lovely view
Twinkle twinkle Christmas lights
Lighting up December nights
Donkey Donkey
Donkey donkey don’t you stop
Just let your feet go clippety clop
Your tail goes swish
And you say “Eeyore”
You’re nearly at the stable door
We have had a really enjoyable week in the cold sunshine! Much more fun available in the lovely gardens here than during those rainy days last week!! We had a week of no planning outside to enable us to watch and observe, join in play, …
We started our week thanking people who keep us safe – Remembrance is a hard topic for pre-school age children so we keep it simple but it is important to learn respect and to remember so we talk a lot about being safe. The staff …
Welcome back after half term – we hope you all had some lovely family fun in the holidays and please do add pictures to tapestry for your key person to see! We have seen some really nice pictures and the children love to look at themselves!
Our circle times this week have been really settled and fun, we have concentrated on learning all about fire safety ahead of Bonfire Night and there has been a lot of glitter and paint around pre-school while we have made some wonderful firework pictures.
The info from you all on the favourite characters has been great – we had a huge response and so many different ideas! We have used some in our learning this week and we will continue next week too, using the characters they love to inspire their learning.
The Vet role play has also been a real hit! We have lots of children who are keen vets and receptionists! Our sun table has had a shape focus to help us plan further activities for learning and we have loved looking at all of the Disney photos and Peppa Pig World pics too!
The Forest School groups have swapped over – Moon group on a Thursday and Sun group on a Friday.
We have football with Alfie starting on Monday for the Sun and Moon groups which will be a lovely experience and we will continue with ball skills over the next week outside as well, adding in giant skittles, balloon tennis and more football.
We will be supporting Children In Need on Friday by wearing bright colours and encourage all the children to come in bright colours for the day too! Please make a donation if you can into the Pudsey jar in reception over the week. This charity has supported us with a project a number of years ago so it is a day that we really like to support.
Our new committee have also been busy and have booked a Christmas Bingo date! Saturday 6th December at the Town Hall – tickets available from the pre-school office and we hope it will be a super busy night raising money for a new wobbly bridge for our children!
Our last week at pre-school has been a bit rainy but we have persevered and enjoyed outside activities as often as we could! We had obstacle courses and games and a big sand area to explore. Inside we have set up a lovely little cafe …
We plan many trips over the year and had our first explore this week with a wonderful harvest themed trip to our local church St Andrews. The children walked beautifully up the to church, looking and listening for cars and tractors, looking out for poo …
We have enjoyed our farm shop role play outside – we set up a shop and a little areas for our pretend animals! Using pink balloons for the pigs in our pen and white for the sheep pen! We loved meeting Claire’s chicken on Monday to bring the role play to life. The chicken visited the 3 afternoon circles and the children loved feeding her and watching her peck away at the grains, also learning the vocab to describe her – wattle and comb.
Our circle times have had a focus on Autumn chat and games and craft, including conker painting, leaf printing, finger painting, Autumn songs and dances, making autumn sun catchers and rolling conkers, making clay hedgehogs and leaf kebabs, sorting leaves in colour and size and marble painting pumpkins and decorating an autumn tree.
We made our own snack again this week – jam muffins, the children love to cook on a Tuesday morning.
On the sun table during free flow we have been exploring autumn and harvest and foods, with some lovely donations – thank you! We have enjoyed a lot of different smoothies which we made together with frozen fruit and water, some pretend pancake making, an exploration of citrus fruits in a tray and making pretend cakes too.
Our observations on the children have been really helpful and we are now able to share an on entry point with you – you will see from these that some areas will be on track developmentally and some will need a bit of nurture – this is usually because we haven’t had enough time to observe all the areas of learning yet but this does give us good info on what we need to plan to help with this and where children may really need a bit of extra support. Any questions please feel free to ask your key person! These forms will be handed out over the coming week and we really value your
Another great week at pre-school – full of exciting activities and circle times, inspiring the children to learn and to engage with imaginative ideas! The Sun and Moon circle groups have enjoyed a real range of brilliant ideas – we have made volcanoes, coloured water, …