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!

Welcome back to all our families after the Easter holidays, we hope everyone had a lovely break and the children were happy to be back. The sunshine has been wonderful and the outside has been transformed into a busy pirate ship and cave of wonder! The pirate these has been a real treat as the children really love it – we have dressed up, made telescopes and treasure and maps and weaved all the areas of learning into the theme. Each part of pre-school has also had other activities available for anyone not wishing to be a pirate such as interesting water play with solar powered fountains, science experiments inside and playdoh with herbs and flowers.

Sun and Moon circle times have been focused on some maths work using pirate themes such as matching and counting pirate treasure coins, some pirate skills needed to be learnt – scrubbing the decks, walking the plank and staying safe in a storm! They have also practised scissor skills – cutting our pirate pictures, worked on letter sounds and

The Star group have searched for treasure in giant trays, matched number and counting coins, singing pirate songs and balancing coins on pirate ships and counting how many they carried before they sank!

Our star children have started their mini forest school sessions this week on a Thursday and Friday mornings and they get all togged up in their waterproofs with help from Sophie and Jackie so that they are getting used to the sessions and build independence ahead of the Autumn Term.

Our Tree of Kindness is up in the Moon cloakroom and we have a number of leaves to hand out for lovely moments of kindness, hard work, determination and being caring – Betsy has one for kindness, Jed for hard work, Ralph, Bella and Halle for determination – well done all.

Robot Reg is back! He has come to visit with his helper Rebecca and the children shrieked with excitement at her return! She can see a brilliant amount of progress in the sun and moon groups. We will be working on more phonics over the term as well.

We will be celebrating the Coronation and will start to learn about the King next week – some of our children will remember our Jubilee celebrations for the Queen when they were Stars last year and some will hopefully remember the change from our Queen to our new King as we walked up to the proclamation as a pre-school group at the Bull Ring. It will be a happy occasion and an important one to mark for the children.

Next week we will continue along our pirate theme, we will also add in some more science by learning about our senses and using our senses and will develop our water area too.

We would love donations of balloons, water balloons, cornflour, flour, pirate items and any coronation celebration items from the supermarkets please