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.

We have had a really wonderful end to our summer term, ending with our graduation ceremony in the sunshine and it was brilliant to be able to welcome families back into the pre-school to watch, the last one we did with families was 2019!

We hope our families enjoyed the celebration of your child’s time with us, and that they love their books and the delicious very special cake made by Victoria, one of our parents so a huge thank you to her.

The children are so ready to move onto school, we are proud to have prepared them well and to see our little Stars move into the school starter groups in the Autumn. All children have made happy memories and lovely progress with us through the dedication of the staff and the support from you all as their families.

This week has been full of “favourite moments” from learning to dance in Strictly style to noodles with Louise W, Andrea made beautiful handprints as a lovely memory to keep with a big hug at the end of the circle time as well.

We had a lovely visit from St Andrew’s teachers and there were two stay and play sessions for children at Willowbank too.

Animals2U came in to give the children an animal experience on Thursday and Friday mornings and Maria commented on how well the children behaved and how well they understood the natural world and loved meeting Huff and Puff the mice, the snake, the stick insect and a tortoise.

We would like to take the opportunity to wish you all a very happy summer holiday and thank you for all your support over the last year and we look forward to welcoming our stars and new families back in the Autumn.