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!

Welcome back to the second half of our Autumn Term – always a busy and exciting few weeks for us while we explore Halloween and Bonfire Night, plan our Nativity and enjoy Forest School, make Christmas crafts and re-settle back into the routines.

The children have settled back in well, we did have fire drills this week which is an essential part to keeping children safe and they have been amazing, listening to our instructions, moving out of the building quickly and lining up beautifully to be counted. We are very proud of them all and even if it has unsettled a couple we have now finished the practices so please reassure your child and say well done!

The pre-school has been turned into a space station for the week and this has been really popular with the children, we have lots of budding Tim Peake’s and lots of children wearing white shirts over coats to be astronauts. This theme is weaved into the different areas at pre-school in free flow activities, creating props, reading stories and learning about planets and space in our circle times. This means we are really working hard on all areas of learning within our theme and we also have lots of other activities on offer (continuous provision) for children to explore at their own pace and some which are adult led such as letters and sounds on the Sun table this week with a focus on speech and language.

Circle times have been planned around our theme and also around our new set of planning which will be available on our website soon. We plan very carefully to ensure we create an exciting curriculum and help all of the children make progress.

The Star group have been learning about stories and feelings, they have also enjoyed some number songs and made firework pictures and played parachute games and moved to our Sticky Kids CD which encourages movement.

The Sun and Moon groups have learnt about space and rockets and Tim Peake and astronauts and planets! They have also moved to music using silk scarves to show movement and copied each others moves too, the groups have also learnt their letters by finding a rocket with the matching letter on it to make their names and made bonfire picture and firework pictures and talked about how to be safe. We also made a Guy Fawkes for Tiverton Golf Club’s Bonfire – the children loved making him but we did have to skirt over the issue of him being set alight so I hope no-one is worrying about him as he takes part in Bonfire Night! The Gold Club were thrilled with him when I delivered him yesterday and have given us vouchers for a 2 course carvery for 4 to be used in 2022 so we will be raffling those off to raise funds for our pre-school. Watch out for that!

We have parent consultations starting on Monday – you will have a 10 minute appointment with your child’s key person, you will have a chance to chat and look at the new version of the learning journey and ask questions and share worries – if you feel you need a longer appointment if you have concerns let your key person know and we will arrange another appointment for you.

We are creating a calendar of exciting events for the children at preschool and will be working with our local community to go out and about, go on trips, invite the police in, different musicians and sports coaches in as well and would love to invite you, as parents in to visit us – do you play an instrument? Is sport a hobby? Can you come in and make something with the children for half an hour? We are so keen to get our families involved in our setting and the children are always so proud to show off their parent or grandparent or pet! Please do offer and we will look after you while you are here!