It is amazing to think we have already completed 7 weeks of the year at pre-school and this half term has been filled with joy – and ending in two trips up to St Andrew’s Church for the school starter children. What a treat it has been to get out and about in our community again and we had a wonderful time – exploring the beautiful church and a warm welcome (and party rings!) from Carrie the Families Minister there. We will be back in the church in December to perform our Nativity for you and the new stage looks fantastic!

We have lots of other ideas for trips and in order to carry these out we do need extra helpers to ensure the children are safe and well looked after while we walk, we are hoping to get to Tufty Park, to visit the schools, to the CCA fields and to the train and motorway bridges, to the Walronds, and on the bus for an exciting adventure! Please do offer to help if you can. We are also planning to welcome visitors back into our setting – the lollipop lady is always lovely, dancers, children from CCC with musical instruments, we are hoping to hold an afternoon tea for grandparents, invite sports coaches in as well – we would also love to hear from you if you have any fun hobbies or skills you can share with us!

The children have had a really enjoyable week, we have dressed up and had our faces painted, been on treasure hunts, explored pumpkins and squashes, made banana ghosts for snack, made apple cake for snack, challenged ourselves on the new climbing blocks, played with the train tracks, enjoyed stories, made lots of Halloween craft and learnt new vocabulary, taken part in circle times and developed our ideas in our construction area outside. We have also had the hairdressers set out too and we have some wonderfully careful children who have obviously watched their Mum’s straightener their hair!

Circle times have been very popular again, the Stars have loved their Forest School experience this Friday morning which they took part in while the older children were out on a trip! They have also been using the instruments to take part in listening and attention games, made Halloween masks, made pumpkin pictures by apple printing. The group also got all dressed up and went for a pumpkin hunt and loved the sensory gloopy Halloween tray.

The Sun and Moon groups loved decorating Halloween biscuits and acted out the Room on the Broom story. We heard lots of laughter during Andrea’s 5 little duck game and great exercise as they jumped over a pretend river and during Michelle’s Halloween spider game! They all behaved beautifully on our Church visit, walking carefully, holding hands and following all the rules and they listened carefully to Carrie at the Church.

After half term we will be focusing on speech and language, learning about books, and we will have a book of the week which we would love you to read at home as well if you have a copy. We will also be lending books out to you to take home to promote reading at bedtime. We will also be learning about our planet and space for 4 weeks before thinking about Christmas and family memories.

We have been really busy with our farm shop and farm activities this week. The garden has been full of fun and lots of happy memories have been made enjoying all the games we have played – we have made a chicken that lays eggs to much hilarity, we have planted spring bulbs, harvested some more apples, built a tractor and enjoyed riding the bikes and exploring our new climbing cubes and mini stage – lots of physical challenge in the garden with some excellent jumping!

Inside we have also been milking cows….not real ones! We made gloves into udders and filled them with milk and made a tiny pin prick hole so that we could squeeze out the milk! Fantastic for hand strength and lots of laughs at the same time. The children really enjoyed making their own sensory farm tray – we get lots of ides from pinterest and education blogs and websites but we do like to let the children lead and make the activities if we can and I had a big bunch of happy helpers cutting grass for me for our tray, it gives them real ownership and we have some excellent rule followers too – ensuring they were safe and that the grass was safely delivered inside for the tray! Another fun activity was washing muddy animals using toothbrushes, there was a lot of mud!

We cook our own snacks at pre-school so Wednesday morning is always a baking morning for the children. There was a focus on reading stories as well and fine motor craft.

Circle times were a big hit this week, they are voluntary this year as we have a longer free flow period which is creating a wonderful atmosphere for the children, less stop points during the day which inhibit exploration but when we ring the tambourine or triangle every single child in their groups comes running in for circle time. They have been rewarded with a visit from some chickens, lots of farm craft, learning about numbers and how to match quantity to a number, we went on a hedgehog hunt in our garden and learnt some farmyard facts. The Stars also love coming together for songs, and this week they have progressed to shape puzzles and a shape song, learning the animal boogie, using the big parachute and following instructions and drawing to songs and learning each others names.

We really feel so settled and happy with the groups and are looking forward to a really super busy year, getting out in our community – we will be sending our requests for parents to help us on trips so please lend a hand if you can! Thank you to everyone who has volunteered on the committee as well, I look forward to working with you all and sharing our plans for the year.

Another fantastic week at pre-school and we have welcomed all of our new star group through the week and all of the session visits have been a great success. It is lovely to meet you all and we hope you have enjoyed the visits and they help to prepare your little one when they start next week. The Stars will be dropped off at the main reception and we will welcome and care for each child as they come in and take them to the ladies waiting in the star room. We have 3 staff in that room and the Stars have a bit of quiet time in there to settle without all the older children, they then have snack and head off outside to play and can then access the full free flow ethos of the setting. We aim to have them all settled in by half term and happy in the busy pre-school so that they can access full free flow with all the children from around October half term.

We turned the new outdoor playhouse into a fire station this week which has been a great success! We have put out pretend fires in Costa and McDonalds – rescuing the customers and putting out the fires, I have had lots of willing firefighters to play with and we built a fire engine outside as well and we will carry on our role play next week.

Inside we have been making radios and walkie talkies and fire extinguishers and breathing packs to support the play outside. We have also had some wonderful activities inside for free play such as loose parts/transient art trays for exploration of different materials, we have had lots of small worlds set up – farm, fairies, under the sea, we have had maths and literacy activities and robot trays and playdoh and we picked blackberries and apples from our own garden and then we made a wonderful fruit compote for our snack!

Our circle times are going so well and all the children come and take part, this week we have learnt about and drawn sunflowers following a donation via fairshare of 4 bunches from Tesco, we have enjoyed story sacks and made houses for the 3 Little Pigs, we have made a height chart which we will update in a few months to see how everyone has grown! The children also enjoyed a matching game where we took off all our shoes and put them into a big bag! We took the shoes out one by one and looked at the pattern and style and they were amazing at recalling which shoe belonged to which friend!

Next week we will be learning about bread and how to make it and it’s ingredients and we will be eating it for our snack too. We are also going to plan our nurture groups which help children to make friends and settle in and give them some quiet time in the setting. We hope you are all happy with your first two weeks and that our returning children are also enjoying preschool in our Sun and Moon groups! Any worries please do get in touch.