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.

We hope that those of you with children leaving us have liked your graduation photos! This is a good fundraise and all of the profit will go straight into buying a gift for your child as they leave us and maybe for buying equipment for the new starters in September so we are really grateful for an orders that you place. We will be planning an end of term celebration and more details will follow next week for the school starter children. We hope you have been enjoying your visits to your new primary schools and it was lovely to welcome Mrs Davies here last week for a visit too.

Our week has been very full and busy as always, we are loving our garden and have packed away the castle role play and we have set up a garden centre shop – we would love any donations of fresh flowers or garden magazines too please?

Our group times are flying along and the children are brilliant – they really love to learn and love to share their ideas with us and their knowledge.

We certainly have some budding engineers as we embarked on learning about bridges this week in one circle time which then expanded into work all over the preschool and we hope to go out and about next week to walk to the nearest bridge!

Moon and Sun groups have been working on movement and combinations of actions as well, they have learnt about so many different kinds of patterns again and this has really ensured that they have made progress. We worked very hard on both groups to build bridges – aqueducts, viaducts and many other types too, over rivers and roads – fantastic imagination and creativity.  The sun group were also lucky enough to work with the beautiful willow hearts that Vik made for us. The groups have also worked with Alison and Louise W to make our own temporary pond in the front garden, walking out to the leat to collect water for the pond and a few new friends!

The star group have been outside in the back garden exploring again, they have also loved mini Forest School making spiders and using the saw. The group have been learning about butterflies, colour patterns, name recognition and also learning about frogs and how to take care of them and listening for sounds in our garden.

Our caterpillars are now forming chrysalides and we expect them to hatch next week and we will then have our hungry caterpillar party in the back garden!

For Families who are staying with us next year, some new information will be coming out to you about how the Early Years Foundation stage will change next Autumn, any worries do get in touch and we are also starting session visits for new children in a weeks time.

We have had a wonderful week and really enjoyed all the sunshine in the garden, we have made some fantastic small worlds on our sun table and will post those photos on facebook soon. We made a fairy world, mountain, farmyard, pyramids and the desert, an ocean scene and a teddy bear’s picnic too. We have also learnt a lot about road safety and we went on a walk to test our new knowledge and the children were great! We stopped and looked carefully and listened for cars and spotted hazards and talked about what was safe and unsafe. We enjoyed having the bikes out all day every day for the road safety week too.

We have an amazing total of £1895 for the sponsored bike ride which is really incredible – I have been looking through lots of early years catalogues and working on what we can order and how to revamp the pre-school and will be ordering some lovely things which I hope all your children can enjoy. Thank you all very very much indeed.

A real highlight of the week is the Forest School finale, we were lucky enough to invite parents along to lunch around the fire and on a walk to the river to sail the boats that we made. It was really wonderful to hear the sounds of voices in the garden again and to see how excited the children were to show their family around the Forest School garden.

We welcomed Mrs Davies from Willowbank this week which was great as she got to meet some of her children for the Autumn Term, circles have been full of fun and laughter with paper aeroplane making, stick insect yoga, learning about 3D shapes, making clay hedgehogs and our own traffic lights, we have built hoses for the 3 little pigs and looked a a video of Amelia’s pigs and drawn pictures of them, lots of dancing and singing and acting and stories as well.

We hope you all have a wonderful week off and we are back to open pre-school for the last half of term (can you believe it!!) on Monday 7th June – see you all during the course of that week.