We have loved the sunshine this week and exploring the ice that we discover on the grass and in the trays we leave out! Our planning has been based on proprioception work outside – this is the sense of our body in space and self-movement, this will help with body posture and movement skills. We have some new equipment that was bought from the £1200 book sales money from Tesco and the children love a new piece of equipment!! Lots of challenge and climbing and obstacle courses which are brilliant for exercise and co-ordination.

We have also had a visitor this week – Robot Reg! He is back and will be visiting for 6 sessions over this term – he is coming on a Thursday at the moment and we hope to book him again with his helper Rebecca for the Friday group in the summer term. It is great to hear the music and the laughter as the children learn letter sounds with them.

Thank you to everyone who donated compost, raspberry canes and seeds and pots for us, we have been enjoying making pots of cress to make cress heads and we will be having a tidy up in the garden ready for Spring too. Our bulbs that we planted in the Autumn are starting to come through now which is exciting.

The free flow time has been a lovely busy week and the children have loved mixing and baking and scrubbing the veggies and the fried egg tray and the pretend pancake tray too! We certainly have some contenders for Junior Bake Off in the future!!

Circles have been brilliant, lots of happy children competing to take the most steps and compare their pedometer scores! Shape work, exercise with stretchy bands to explore our arm muscles and learning to throw and catch tennis balls, working together and giving each other lots of praise and encouragement. The Sun and Moons have also worked on their literacy skills – enjoying a story sack and then re-telling the story, learnt letter sounds in their names and welcomed Robot Reg!

The Star group have built towers, enjoyed large scale painting, learnt about feelings, played hide and seek in the back garden and explored instruments too.

The Forest School groups enjoyed some chilly sunshine in the back garden, lighting the fire, having hot chocolate, making their own “walk the plank” games and the photos are wonderful on the blog. The children had an assault course as well with a sea saw and a badger tunnel and they have made a giant bug hotel together too.

Next week we will carry on with exercise in the garden to keep warm and get strong! Our new monkey bars are here which will provide a great challenge and will be used under supervision only. We will be mark making inside and learning about colour – linking that to our overall theme of nature and we look forward to another fun and busy week!

We have had the most wonderful week – the highlight being the brilliant Christmas party and Nativity which we held at the Community Centre and St Andrews Church. The children were amazing and we so loved their performance and their very enthusiastic partying as well! They loved playing the party games, chasing balloons, dancing to Xmas songs and eating yummy party food.

A visit from Father Christmas was fantastic and the children were absolutely in awe of him when he knocked on the door – they sang him some songs from our show and he had his photo taken with some of the children and these will be in your special books! We hope all the children enjoyed seeing him and enjoy their gift which is paid for from our fundraising pot.

We have had a lovely last week but everyone is ready for a nice rest and hopefully time with family and friends celebrating Christmas. We would all like to say a huge thank you for all the very kind gifts and cards – we love our job very much and it really is a pleasure to care for and be with your children.

We wish you all a happy and healthy Christmas and we look forward to hearing all your news when we come back in January – Happy New Year!

Christmas is beginning to arrive at Pre-School! We have a beautiful tree in our reception area which was donated by Big Rob’s Christmas Tree’s which are based at Millenium Way – we love having a real tree and we have our Christmas post box as well in reception so please pop any Christmas cards into the box by the 10th December for us to distribute them into the baskets for each child.

Following our theme we have been learning about the environment around us, our town and reading stories by Julia Donaldson over the week. We have watched our amazing new Forest School Shelter go up in the back garden which is being built by The Outdoors group and we cannot wait to use it! Next week our theme moves forward towards winter and Christmas and we will be learning about and exploring ice on the sun table, we will be setting up activities to promote mark making and would love donations of any nice stationary and pens and unusual pencils or the 4 colour biros!

We use talking temptation posters to start conversations and teach the children about different concepts and we have enjoyed “Frogs” and “Counting” and “Twinkle Twinkle” and “Wind” – these are brilliant posters which I save from Nursery World Magazine and they help us with our planning as we can see what interests the children!

We also set up a tough tray activity each morning and afternoon alongside our main plan in the sun room which has been re-creating Mandy’s office!

Outside we are starting to build our Polar Express station and we have a theatre set up as well for good exercise while dancing and also to build confidence in performing ahead of our Christmas play!

We will share a couple of the songs via email next week to help the children practice!

Forest School this week has been focused on using tools such as saws to start creating spiders to take home but with the building of the new shelter we have been watching the team use their tools too!