Not long until our Christmas party and performance and we look forward to welcoming you to St Andrew’s Church next Wednesday – don’t forget that pre-school will be CLOSED for the whole day and all staff will be at the Community Centre so please telephone 07927057415 or text if you have any questions – we won’t have wraparound care available that day either as we will be moving scenery into and then out of the church for the performances.

We have had quite a quiet week due to lots of illnesses so we hope everyone gets better soon.

The sun room has been smelling amazing this week as we have had some wonderful sensory trays filled with ginger and hot chocolate and our festive cafe was selling salt dough donuts that we had made and lots of yummy little wooden cakes and macarons! We have had Christmas supermarket magazines out as well, reading the recipes together and deciding what looked yummy.

We have enjoyed a few dough disco sessions on the sun table to help build arm and hand strength and the children have loved playing with the small world set of our Happy Land toys. We will keep those out for next week as well.

Circle times have had a festive theme with lots of games of Christmas Bingo, chatting about Elves on a shelf and counting games, decorating gingerbread men, a card matching games, decoration making, cutting snowflakes, making snow man pictures and following a pattern of lights with pom poms. For the children who are in the performance we have been dressing up and taking some photos for the slideshow that we have in the Church while you are all coming in to be seated.

We will also take photos of the children before the performance at the party and when they are dressed up to share on the parent gallery. Quite a few children have been off this week so have missed having their pictures taken.

We are having a week of cooking next week with some things to bring home hopefully, we will be making ice sensory trays and outside we are planning to have lots of active fun with balloons and bubbles and our mud kitchen.

Have a lovely weekend and we will look forward to sharing our special Christmas party day with the families and children who are attending.

We have continued with our space theme this week and have expanded our space control command centre in the garden and made our own moon buggy after learning about the International Space Station last week and lunar landings. We have supported the role play with lots of craft and learning in circle times. Outside we have been using our throwing skills in an asteroid tossing game, we have made space exploration boxes and enjoyed role play with walkie talkies and rocket back packs.

We have also had a focus on sand play this week with lots of new ideas and a different set up each morning and afternoon in our sand tray with an adult there to support language development, to listen to ideas and to move play forward. We will be collecting photos of this each day next week and sharing those via a gallery on Tapestry.

Our literacy focus continues with lots of mark making and letter sounds this week, lots of space based literacy work.

Circle times this week:-

Star group – we have new children who have started this week which is really exciting and we have been welcoming them and supporting them to learn the routines here at pre-school and to learn names of friends. The group have had some great space stories and learnt space songs, looked for space numbers in shaving foam and watched a space rocket video, built rockets and enjoyed a Pudsey dance party on Friday!

Sun and Moon group – more focus on letters and their sounds within a space theme, making space silly soup, searching for letters in a space rocket, writing labels for aliens from a space story, looking at non fiction space books, a planet letter game and drawing and colouring planets using our new planet balls!

Forest School has continued this week outside in the fresh autumn air, the children are wrapped up warm, they enjoy the learning outside and the hot chocolate!!

The end of our week brings our Pudsey and Peppa Pig Party raising money for Children in Need! Thanks to all those families who have dressed up and donated, we know Children in Need is a charity that makes a huge difference to children.

Next week we are moving towards Christmas! We are starting a theatre outside to support the children to grow in confidence to perform with friends ahead of our Nativity on the 11th December at the Church.

We have had a focus on healthy habits this week and this will continue into next week as well and the children have really loved our farm shop outside. We managed to buy some of the wonderful wooden grocery sets from Aldi and these have been brilliant along with some wooden eggs and a few packets with different languages and different grocery items. It has been a really popular role play area and we have also had a lovely cafe and pizza restaurant going on in the sun room too. The wooden sets from Aldi are really lovely and the doughnuts and cup cakes were very popular along with the mini coffee barista machine!

Forest School sessions have been bathed in sun this week after the rain earlier in the week and we have put some photos of the Thursday Sun group on Tapestry for you. No trips out this week but we will be welcoming Alfie back for another football session next Monday 21st October.

Next week is our last week before we have a week off for half term, and we will be exploring Halloween dressing up, craft and sensory pumpkin trays, along with a literacy focus and more movement. We started Disco Thursday which is a dance session instead of story time just before lunch – any song requests would be great! We have had a few requests from “Sing” movies! Please pop us a message on Tapestry if your child loves a particular song from a movie or the radio!

Our circle times have been focused on being healthy and have covered a wide range of topics such as sleep, healthy food and treats, lots of exercise – fitness and yoga, dancing and aerobics! Lots of sorting food and working on independence too – finding our own shoes from a big pile and putting them on without help, learning about keeping our teeth clean, and healthy lunchboxes.

Have a lovely weekend and please do take a pumpkin to colour or decorate to win a prize!