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!

Happy New Year to all our families! We hope that you had a happy Christmas and New Year period and the children have settled straight back into our routines and are happy and busy and playing beautifully!

The Spring term is a lovely time for us here at pre-school, we look forward and learn about growth and change, we look at the world around us and explore nature and touch on topics such as health and wellbeing, exercise, sleep, teeth and illness and we learn about how to be healthy too.

We will have a focus on literacy for January and Maths for February but of course both of these creep into all of our games and role play and circle times daily too.

We also run lots of nurture groups and this half term we have groups of 2 or 3 children at a time working on friendships, confidence, physical development, emotions and “wanderers” – these are children that need a little extra adult support when out and about in free flow – free flow is from 10.15 – 11.35 and this can be a busy time and some children find it hard to decide what to play with when there is so much on offer so a guiding hand and gentle help supports them to make choices and learn how to play with friends or how to play with a particular activity that they may have never seen before. Our groups change based on the individual children’s needs each half term.

Our circle times this week have been a lovely welcome back and chats about Christmas presents!

Stars have been mark making, drawing presents which helps them to learn that marks have meaning, they have also looked at their names along our literacy theme and used pretty counters to follow the line of the first letter of their name, helping them to recognise it. They have sorted fruit and veg using real items to bring that to life and learnt about body awareness, singing head shoulders knees and toes and listening to their heart rate after running!

Sun and Moon groups have also created some wonderful pictures of Christmas presents too! Their skills at representing objects in drawings are really developing well. The groups have learnt about their bones and skeletons, using a pretend x ray scanner on our ipad and then drawing their hand or skull on black paper, we have looked at dinosaur x-rays as well and also explored lunch boxes looking for fruit and we are learning about a different food group each week over this half term. At lunchtimes we will be making a tally chart together, looking at who has which fruit, then which dairy product etc over the half term and I will share these charts on the whiteboard in Reception so please point them out to the children when you are in the queue and take the chance to count and talk about the foods on the list.

As a charity money is very very tight for us this year with rising costs, we know all families are feeling the rise in the cost of living but if anyone could possibly make donations of the following we would be so grateful – bird feeders and bird food (NUT FREE please) and rice and flour and vinegar and bicarb and cereals and for the activities next week we would love lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, tinned sweetcorn, frozen fruit, mini tortilla, cheese, mango, pomegranite, kiwi, fig, lime, lemon, pineapple (fresh) and any other fascinating fruits you may see!

I attended a course on Invasive Groups Strep A this week with the South West Public Health unit so information will be coming out via email but as always please get in touch if you have any concerns.

Next week we will be making smoothies, fruit kebabs, mini healthy pizzas, learning about nature, focusing on letters and their sounds. Moon group are enjoying Forest School on a Thursday and the Sun group on a Friday this half term. and this week they have reminded each other of the rules and how to be safe and also learnt about ladybirds! They know that ladybirds can eat 5000 insects in their lifetime, they are actually beetles and play dead to avoid being eaten and usually have 7 spots!