Another busy week here at pre-school with so much going on in the gorgeous spring sunshine! We ahve loved spending time this week learning about Easter and Holi (Hindu festival that celebrates Spring) and for those children in my circle time early in the week I hope the powder paint came out of your hair! The ladies have done a wonderful job as always teaching and playing and nurturing and taking care of all the children and we are all looking forward to some lovely days next week before we break up for the Easter holidays.

We have enjoyed role play in the sun room and there are some fantastic photos of the children taking great care of the babies and some wonderful observations too.

The Star group have been drawing and learning about emotions, they have been practising drawing circles and lines which is a great start for faces! They have learnt to take off their shoes and socks and put them on again, acted out the Bear Hunt story, drawn their families and had Easter egg hunts with patterned eggs and numbered eggs too!

The Sun group have learnt about Holi, learnt about our world and what we know about it, practised initial sounds in words and matched tricky Easter egg patterns too, organising and sorting them.

The Moon group have also talked about the world and the different countries, looking at maps and the globe, chatting about families that have family across the world and where we have been on holiday. The Moons have replanted their tomato seeds into bigger pots and taken them home, they have learnt initial sounds by finding hidden letters.

Mini Forest School has been a treat this week and the Thursday group cleared out the pond and saw our resident hedgehog too! The Friday group enjoyed an Easter chick hunt and rolling down the mini hills and the mud kitchen.

Next week we will be celebrating Holi on Monday 29th March, and more Easter cooking and craft too. For home learning a good idea would be look up the Earth on your phones or tablets, chat about what makes up the different colours and the names of some countries and the differences between weather and landscapes and animals as we will be learning about the Earth in our group times.

We have really enjoyed our week here with lots of real highlights in our week! One highlight was World Book Day – we usually go out for a trip to the library which sadly couldn’t happen this year but we had a great day seeing everyone on their costumes and see the efforts people had made, we know not everyone likes dressing up but all of the children were smiling all day and some used our dressing up clothes as well. Another highlight was meeting a cockerel called Bubble – he came to visit us on Wednesday and spent his day being looked after by the children and being fed cornflakes and left over snack and he delighted the children with lots of “cockadoodle doo’s” throughout the day! We have also been learning about growth and we have some enthusiastic gardeners too – our cress has germinated after a couple of days and the children are thrilled to see the green leaves appear as if by magic! The children also loved our mixing station this week – we have been working with petals, cereals, herbal teas and have created some lovely potions and mixtures – fantastic observations from this activity station.

We are moving on from animals as a theme to transport for two weeks, before moving onto Easter. For transport we would love you to take photos of interesting cars or lorries or bikes while you are out and about for your daily exercise. If you can find dumper trucks or excavators or any other heavy machinery that would also be brilliant! Please email them in to me amelia.cullomptonpreschool@btconnect.com and we will use those for circle times.

You will be given your child’s next step for home learning over the next week or so and please send your feedback in on the slip we give you or by email to me or to Mandy for us to share with your key person.

Next week we will also be working on cafe role play, tools and gross motor skills and transport and construction outside as well. We are also running little nurture groups for children and your key person will let you know if your child needs any support in any specific areas. We will be working on literacy and maths, friendships, supporting children in circle time, and nurturing the children who have been away from pre-school since December.

Circle times this week have been well planned as always:-

Star group – have learnt about life cycles, counting by learning number songs and have acted out stories and collected lovely interesting things from the back garden during an explore and brought them back in to talk about them. They have also copied some letters from their names and drawn their favourite foods onto plates.

The Sun and Moon groups have been learnt about how to take care of a chicken, how to grow cress, planted tomato seeds and chatted about where their food comes from. They have also enjoyed some animal crafts too and listening and attention games and chatted about World Book Day and played number bingo and letter bingo too – a busy week!

Our mini Forest School sessions are also going really well, the children love their time out in the back garden and we are excited that Sophie and Jackie will both be training as Level 3 Forest School leaders later this year.

We are now starting to build our register for the Autumn Term so if you have any friends with little ones please encourage them to get in touch sooner rather than later as we are already looking quite busy!