A lovely settled week at pre-school and a wonderful time was had at our two Grandparents coffee mornings, the children really loved to welcome them and show them around and play and we hope all of the Grandparents enjoyed their morning here and their hot drinks and scones! Thank you to them all for coming and we will organise another one in the summer term on a different day of the week.

We have been really busy over the last week, another Robot Reg visit which was fantastic and a visit from a lovely lady called Carol who introduced us to story massage, and it was amazing. I have put some photos onto the blog and you will see the children sitting in a circle facing each other’s back and Carol reads us a story and demonstrates the massage movements and the children followed her instructions beautifully. It is voluntary to take part and a really good message is that each child asked their friends if they wanted a massage and children can say no.

We have been continuing our space theme and have been learning about all the planets and we have a great display in our cloakroom and in our moon room of the work we have done.

Thank you to all families who donated items for our pantry and kitchen snack cupboards – you have been incredibly generous and our cupboards are full. We are really grateful and this will save us a really good chunk of our shopping budget which can then be spent on resources for the children so thank you very much.

There are some lovely Forest School photos from last week and this on the blog – the children have been making leaf crowns this week and they focus on a minibeast each week. This week is it ants! They have learnt that ants have 6 legs, they can taste and smell and feel with their antenna and do not have ears. Two children found spiders and counted their legs, learning that spiders have more legs than ants and our frogs are still in the pond too.

Circle times have been space based as well as building on listening skills too. We have enjoyed making planets, playing a Nina and the Neurons game on the computer, balloon blast off and counting our space money too. The Stars have been practising learning about questions, who what and where and making houses and talking about their family. They learnt a solar system song and painted some moons too.

Other activities have included space role play outside and we have been so thrilled to hear children talking about planets and discussing the different colours and names during their play. We have built worlds on the floor of the sun room, a jungle and train track and farm and our town using photos we have printed. We have enjoyed lots of singing and stories and finger gym to strengthen hands.

Next week we will be enjoying soft play inside if it rains, we will be setting up a theatre outside to practise our performance skills as we will start to learn our Christmas songs ready for our amazing Nativity in St Andrew’s Church. The weeks will race past and we will send home a few of the songs for you to practice at home in a couple of weeks.

We hope you all have a lovely weekend

Pre-school has come alive with the beautiful Autumn colours this week, we have been looking at leaves and conkers and colours and natural items, making art work and talking about seasons. The children have bags to collect items over the weekend to bring in for us to explore and feel and smell and touch and we will keep this theme running for another week – adding in Halloween as well. Sensory play is really important for children and we have loved all that Autumn can offer us for this area.

I took the Sun group to St Andrew’s Church on Thursday to talk about Harvest and to experience the organ and climbing the pulpit! We are very lucky and Carrie is incredibly welcoming and the children were really awed by the size of the church and we also loved the drone footage on the screen at the back of the church. This group were the noisiest organ players so far in my whole 9 years! I wonder if the Moons will be as loud next Friday! Thank you to everyone for helping walk with us, it is really great for the children to get out and about and they walked beautifully, chatting all the way and looking out for dog poo of course!

Our sun and moon circles have been concentrating on literacy and books this week and we have been working hard to see how much the children remember about a story, can they tell is back to us, can they remember which characters were in the book and can they act it out? It is really important for children to be read to and to enjoy a story, we will be asking you to bring in their favourite books after half term as well so chat to your child about which one they might choose! We have read Dear Zoo and made a story window with that one and the Gruffalo as well, we have acted out Goldilocks with lots of laugher at how cheeky our puppet Goldilocks was, we read Day Monkey/Night Monkey and made beautiful pictures for Going on a Bear Hunt. Next week we are focusing on listening and attention skills in our groups.

The Star children are amazing, so settled and come into the Star room in the morning for their small group time when they hear the shaker! The photos of such little children enjoying an activity together are so lovely and they are really playing with the older children out in the garden too – some of the Sun and Moon children that were here last year sometimes try to sneak back into the Star room for circle time! The stars have been learning to listen to instructions and follow them, understanding actions and pictures and copying, enjoying a teddy bears picnic and practising prepositions – putting the teddy on the box, next to or behind! We have been checking their understanding levels too and collecting ideas about what areas we need to focus on next.

Outside has been a brilliant place as always at pre-school, lots of police station role play – pretend handcuffs, a jail and catching baddies – the baddies are pretty terrible! They have stolen my lunch, money from pre-school, eaten all the biscuits and keep escaping from the jail! Hearing all the laughter and shrieking has been brilliant and so joyful!

We hope you all have a great weekend collecting Autumn treasures and next week is the last week before half term when we are closed.

We have welcomed our Star children over the course of this week and have really enjoyed watching them start to explore and start to learn the routines! Some tears of course and they are to be expected, but we can already see that our nurturing and distracting and playing can make a difference to even the most upset little person so we feel really encouraged by that and hope that you are all OK as you get used to dropping them off and please do ring in any time you would like for an update on what they are up to!

We have had a brilliant week outside playing in our farm shop, we have made pretend gingerbread men to sell, doughnuts and pretend bread rolls -all from salt dough. We have also made a cow and then milked it by filling plastic gloves with milky water! There is no end to our imagination!

We have also taken two groups up to the fire station again this week – this time we were able to organise going inside and having a sit in the fire engine! We always need volunteers on our trips out as we like to go with a high ratio so keep an eye out for a text request for helpers as we set the date for some trips.

We have had some lovely circle times based on learning about size and height and pattern and shape and colour for the Sun and Moon group. We used our lovely natural items to make pictures after being inspired by the transient art in a gingerbread man story book and made a beautiful rainbow together learning about pattern and colour.

The Star group enjoy some quiet time together, sing a little Hello song and enjoy the instruments before having snack and then go outside to play.

The Sun group had their first Forest School on Thursday and the Moon enjoyed their session today, we will alternate each Thursday and Friday and now that we have two trained staff we will be running sessions for all children over the course of the year.

We have lots of areas on our website to share our ethos and planning and curriculum with you so please do take a look and you will see lots of info about the Early Years Foundation Stage there which is what we follow when caring for and teaching your children.

Next week we will carry on earning about farming and food and harvest time and hope to be visiting the church at some point for a harvest experience.

This week our Sun and Moon children have really settled into a good circle routine, please chat to them about their group times, the Moons are called by a tambourine and the Suns by a triangle. We have a photo of every child in each group which they love looking at. We have also looked at the family selfies too and taken pictures of ourselves in group time, we have also talked about how tall we are and looked at very tall building and recreated them out of blocks. We have enjoyed some physical exercise and activity looking at shapes as well and listened carefully to story sacks.