We have two highlights of the week – Grandparents Afternoon Tea was a great success, we thoroughly enjoyed hosting the families and we hope they had a lovely time – the dear children were very interested in the lovely cakes that we had for the Grandparents so as a little treat we let them have a tiny bit of cupcake each!

We have also said goodbye to our lovely butterflies, they grew so quickly this year with the warm weather so we had to quickly plan our Hungry Caterpillar Picnic Party for Thursday and Friday afternoon to celebrate! This is one of my favourite days of our year with the lovely song and party in our beautiful back garden. We have a special snack with all of the food from the story book!

We have our own castle in our garden and we have had such a lovely week reading fairy tales in it and acting them out, making craft to support role play and making a dungeon and a moat and really learning to take care of the wonderful castle that Andrea built. Lots of Sleeping Beauty role play and princes and princesses rescuing each other!

The event shelter is a good area of shade for us on the warm days and will be the setting for our graduation celebration in 3 weeks time. The graduation photos have gone out now on email and all the proceeds goes towards the fundraising for pre-school toys and equipment. We are seriously underfunded by the government and the funding we get only increases by a small amount for 2023/24 so as a charity we are going to need as much fundraising money as we can achieve! I have secured a visit from our MP Richard Foord to talk to him about that and share our views next Friday!

We have 3 weeks left now until the end of term and we have lots of fun ahead with Animals 2 U coming to visit the setting and school visits happening to St Andrew’s next week.

This week we have been playing with water every day, keeping cool. We have learnt about shapes each morning, we have been working on drawing skills and scissor skills too.

We had a focus on literacy in our circle times this week.

Stars – listening to and hearing to sounds, clapping syllables from our names and using claves to tap along to rhyming songs. We have identified the letter at the beginning our our names and sprayed paint at them too!

Sun and Moons – Lots of rhyming and initial sound work and blending sounds and words and listening and sounding out the letter at the beginning of words. I Spy and our picnic party have finished off our week.

We are planning more castle play next week, some balloon and water play, creating a lovely display for our graduation for an under the sea theme, junk modelling inside and number work too.

We would love donations of clothes we can use for dressing up – not fancy dress but old skirts or jackets or adult clothes, dresses, bridesmaid dresses or anything that might be sparkly or fun, shoes and hats and bags as well please. We are going to set up a charity shop role play as so many of use do buy clothes and toys in them so we thought that would be fun – all donations welcome and if we can’t use the items I will drop them to a real charity shop – hopefully the swimming pool one in our own town and take the children with me!

Welcome back to everyone following a wonderful sunny half term! The sun has been shining all week at preschool and most children have been outside all day, apart from their circle times and lunchtime! They are encouraged to wear sun hats outside and our garden is quite a sun trap so please do remember to put sun cream on in the mornings. We take the water bottle trolley outside during free flow and refill bottles for the children but please do let us know if you don’t think your child is drinking enough and we can keep an eye on that.

Our week has been full of learning about life cycles ahead of our caterpillars arriving at the end of the week and we have also been learning about jobs. Our sun room free flow activity has been to explore a different job each morning and afternoon and we have had some brilliant conversations about work and who goes to work in each home so do take time to explain your job to your child as some have no idea what you do at work and they are often very surprised that we are also Mummies and that we don’t live at pre-school!

Star circle – have had a lovely week of activities and learning, life cycle work, exploring letters, craft and learning about minibeasts and counting legs and wings.

Moon and Sun circle – we have learnt all about life cycles in so many ways, jellyfish, frogs and butterflies – through craft and videos and fact files and dancing and songs and games.

During free flow we have been singing and dancing and reading books about food and stories about food and exploring ice alongside fairytales and playdough.

Forest School has started again for the older groups now, Suns for 3 weeks and then Moons for 2 and one group one at the end which will include and parents and grandparents that would like to come along.

We will be having our grandparents afternoon tea on the 18^th and 20^th June so invitations will come shortly and we have lots of school trips that we will need help to take the children to. Willowbank and St Andrews also have Stay and Play sessions that you take your child to and then bring them back to pre-school if it is a usual pre-school day but we will set up a text reminder for those.

We are having a gardening and water week next week so any donations of compost would be brilliant please!

CONGRATUALTIONS to Michelle – Rhi and Nick for jumping out of a plane to raise money for pre school! They are so brave and have raised over £3000 between them!

After our Coronation celebrations at the weekend there were lots of lovely stories of parties from the children and lots of chatter about our new King!

We have been working on learning about Countries and our community in circle times with the Sun and Moon groups and had great fun looking up houses on google images and choosing photos of buildings in Cullompton and drawing our town. There is a lovely display in the Moon room of the building and the quotes too. The group also talked about their families, learnt about France, learnt to say hello in different languages and talked about how they get to the different places in our town.

The Star group had a colour theme for the week and there are some great photos on the gallery of them in group times. The Stars are loving forest school and again there are some really beautiful photos to look at.

We had a really colourful week with bright playdoh and rainbow activities and large scale mark making and painting in the sun room during free flow.

Construction outside and some fantastic building work going on, lots of moving heavy equipment and building blocks and some exercise too.

We are going to be working hard on our growing garden over the next few weeks and planting seeds and vegetables and will be learning about growth and change.

This week we are also focusing on more painting and mark making, outside playground games and more construction!