We hope all of our families have a wonderful Mother’s Day on Sunday and that you like to card and gift that the children have made for you. We have had a lovely time talking about family at circle times and making little flowers or hearts as well.

We have also had a focus on rules this week, there are some rules at pre-school that are non-negotiable for safety reasons so a little reminder was needed! The main rules are that children are not allowed into a room that has a “Not available – no entry sign”, children must sit while they eat snack and lunch and they are not allowed to open the gate into the kitchen. These are all so important for staying safe and that is how we teach them to the children. Sometimes conflict over toys is also hard to deal with so we support all of the children to work on being kind and asking for help when needed.

Our week has been filled with colour exploration as well and there are some brilliant photos of slime making and colour matching and creating all sorts of craft this week.

The Star children have also been mixing colours, adding colour to cornflour and made rainbow foam. The stars also loved some sensory play with pinecones and flour and cocoa and made Mother’s Day flowers.

The carpet has been busy with fidget toys! Story sacks have been a wonderful adult led activity with clay and playdoh on offer too – the wet weather has been a shame but we get out into the garden as often as we can, despite the wet rain!

The outside has been a busy garage, loads of great role play and fun filling up with petrol and taking turns on the bikes – good practice for our Sponsored bike ride next week! Thank you so much for the sponsorship so far – we think this may be the best year ever fingers crossed!

Next week we will carry on with the garage and workshop outside, we will be completing puzzles inside and working on our understanding at circle times of why and how questions. We will have some shape trays out and will use trains as the base of our role play in the sun room.

We are starting our register now for September 2023 and we have some spaces so please let friends and family know that we are booking people in now for our induction process and can’t wait to meet everyone who is interested in joining us this September – you can call the office on 01884 35018 for more info or to book a tour.

Welcome back after a lovely half term break, all the children were happy to be back and have been full of chat and pleased to see their friends and ladies!

This week we have been playing in our role play circus and fairground in the garden and we will carry this on for a few weeks. We have played lots of different games such as hook a duck, hoopla, skittles and a coconut shy – we would LOVE real coconuts if anyone some across some over the weekend! We have some lovely photos from our play in the garden.

Next week we will carry on with those games and also some circus skills too.

We will be reading lots of books as it is World Book Day at the end of the week and we are off to the library for a lovely trip as well. Thanks to everyone who helps us with our walking trips – we are so grateful as the children really love to get out and about with us and look forward to trips.

Our sun table has been animal heaven, we have been creating and making and learning all about exotic animals and using the ipad to watch video’s and see the animals in their real habitat and we love using our non-fiction books for exploration too. It is a lovely topic and we all enjoy watching the children be inspired and excited in their learning. We will be concentrating on animals in our circle times as well so please feel free to email in and let us know of any exciting animals you have seen at the Zoo or on any exciting travels.

We always love Pancake Day at preschool and it never fails to make the children laugh when tossing the pancakes! Michelle brought in her camping stove and cooked the pancakes in front of the children while I made them in the sun room with the other group, they were all delicious! The blog photo was taken by Betsy! What a brilliant action shot of Michelle!

Circle times were all about pancake day on Monday and Tuesday, exploring ingredient together and making the batter. This group really love to bake. The Sun and Moons designed their ideal pancake toppings and had pancake races and competitions and made a tally chart for their favourite toppings too. We also looked at their learning journeys and talked about being special to people and who they loved and that their key person is their special lady here at preschool. All of the children were engrossed in looking at their photos and spotting their family in their books.

The Star group experimented with the ingredients for the pancake batter and chose their favourite fruits to put onto a pancake. They have explored making their own paints as well, full of interesting textures and smells and created an aquarium for our animal zone in the sun room.

The Forest School sessions have been learning about woodlice and searching for them in the garden, under logs and leaves and we will be on the look out for some frogspawn as well soon for learning about life cycles.

Parent Consultation appointments are available now for you to book in and catch up on progress and see your child’s special book too, please get in touch with Mandy in the office to make an appointment.

We hope you have a lovely weekend!

Our family home life role play has been great fun this week, we have added in pretend baking, babies, a cafe, a home office, lots of turn taking and chatter and wonderful language and kindness and imaginative play. We will carry this on for the next week as well and would love any donations of old home equipment like kettles or a microwave or old hair straighteners or drills or radio’s – anything that doesn’t work any more! We cut the plugs off to make everything extra safe and the children love to use real items, we use real plates and cups to encourage them to look after the objects and the extra weight of using real plates etc improves their strength too. There are some lovely photos on the gallery this week so please have a look, there is a limit on how many I can add so I am sorry if I miss anyone out – let me know if you haven’t spotted your child for a while!

We finished last week with a wonderful celebration for Chinese New Year and this week has ended with a fantastic set of stage shows!

Our theme outside has been construction and we have built many different buildings and chosen patio slabs, laminate worktops, new tools from catalogues and drawn our own ideas.

The Star group have built homes for animals and people, they have started to listen out for sounds in words and enjoyed lots of wonderful story times using the story sacks which are full of props and bring the story to life, really engaging the children.

The Sun and Moon groups have worked along the construction theme in circle time as well – re-creating buildings from photos (Big Ben, The Shard and the National Gallery were favourites!) and this took some really good skills – looking carefully at the photo, talking about the shapes that we needed, working together on an idea and feeling a sense of pride in our creations. We have also constructed a stage and letters and homes for animals over the week.

We had two trips to St Andrew’s School this week as well, on Thursday the Sun group went in the afternoon and on Friday the Moon group headed off to explore. It is lovely to go back and see old friends who are all doing so well at school and to catch up with the Foundation teacher. We played in the Foundation unit, had a story in the library with Miss Rice and played on the climbing frame – another HUGE thank you to the parents that helped us walk there, the children did brilliantly as it is quite a long way.

We have reviewed all the children’s progress and have identified areas for every child to work on and will be sharing home learning ideas with you over the next two weeks and your key person will hand you an idea to support your child at home. We have lots of areas still to teach and work on and all of the reviews help us decide what to plan and we can add in all sorts of learning opportunities into every area of the pre-school!

Next week we continue with construction – building a farm and a mud kitchen outside! We will carry on with home corner role play to support imagination and friendships and turn taking. We continue with Dinosaur craft to encourage the children to the craft area and we will be starting a craft club after half term to encourage those reluctant mark makers and creators!