This is our last full week at pre-school and it is so sad to say goodbye to all our friends that are moving on to primary school in September. We wish them all the best and look forward to seeing them when we visit the school for a trip in the Autumn with our new school starter group!

Our week has been a bit wet, we have made it outside as much as we could and managed the Thursday Forest School parents session which was lovely until the rain came but Friday’s session was a washout so we are so sorry to the parents that missed out on spending that time with their children in our garden – you were probably relieved a little when you saw the rain start on the dot at 9am!

We have enjoyed sensory play this week, with lots of the children feeling quite overwhelmed with school visits it has been a lovely activity for calming and settling. Circle time has been full of fun – lots of dancing and singing and games and competitions and letting the children choose what they would like to do.

Our stars know whether they will be a sun or moon in the Autumn and have had a little mini progress update which we hope you have enjoyed reading with some ideas for learning at home over the holidays.

Our graduation celebrations took place on Thursday outside and inside on Friday – a really lovely time to reflect on a great year here at pre-school and wish our friends good luck with a song and a gift from us. We hope you have all enjoyed your time with us and we look forward to welcoming new friends next year and welcoming back our Stars. Happy holidays to you all – if you need any support over the holidays at all please email amelia@cullomptonpreschool.org and I will check emails weekly and please have a look at the link below if you have school aged children that may benefit from some time at a free club in the holidays – there are clubs running at the leisure centre which are free so have a look and check if you are eligible.

Information for parents and carers – Education and Families (devon.gov.uk)

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!