Our week started with a wonderful visit to the Culm Valley Care home on Monday morning with the sun group – the children really enjoyed the time they spent there with the residents and we also took the opportunity to sing some of our Christmas …
We have enjoyed a lovely week at pre-school, building our listening skills through a variety of games and activities. This is an important area for us to ensure the children are secure in because it is the foundation of all the other areas of learning, …
We have had a really enjoyable week in the cold sunshine! Much more fun available in the lovely gardens here than during those rainy days last week!! We had a week of no planning outside to enable us to watch and observe, join in play, follow the children’s lead and come up with ideas together – we did add in the leaf blower which was absolutely brilliant! The children loved it and there was a lot of shrieking and laughing as the leaves blew all around us, there is a little video on Tapestry for you to see. We have some ideas for next week based on our observations and the group of children that we have this year really love role play and spent time in the sand area making hot chocolates so we are going to set up a Christmas Costa Cafe, which will turn into a Christmas market as well over the coming weeks.
We welcomed Alfie for football on Monday morning which is a lovely set of sessions which the children really enjoy!
We have started on our Christmas preparations and are practising our Xmas songs for the Nativity in the Church, please do let Mandy know if your child is attending.
Our circle times have been based on Maths this week, working on counting and matching numeral and quantity through lots of fun games and activities, it is an area that we will keep working on over the year ahead but lots of practise in spotting number and counting things at home will be a great support for this area.
The Sun and Moon groups have made birthday cakes, counting out candles, had a number race and rolling dice and counting jumps, numicon and counting, Ten in a Bed story time with props, a giant mobile phone to recognise numbers and lego city building!
The Star group have also been working with their maths skills – lots of number songs, counting, patterns and shape work too.
Our role play inside has been a wonderful hairdressers for the week – the children have been incredibly gentle while doing our hair and really imaginative in their play.
Don’t forget we have our Xmas Bingo on the 6th December – please buy your tickets in advance!
We started our week thanking people who keep us safe – Remembrance is a hard topic for pre-school age children so we keep it simple but it is important to learn respect and to remember so we talk a lot about being safe. The staff …
Welcome back after half term – we hope you all had some lovely family fun in the holidays and please do add pictures to tapestry for your key person to see! We have seen some really nice pictures and the children love to look at …
Our last week at pre-school has been a bit rainy but we have persevered and enjoyed outside activities as often as we could! We had obstacle courses and games and a big sand area to explore.
Inside we have set up a lovely little cafe role play, with afternoon tea available and birthday parties to enjoy too. We have made doughnuts and cinnamon rolls from salt dough using real spices and real sprinkles and have sold these in the cafe.
We have been learning about being independent at circle times, teeth brushing, sleep, healthy foods and exercise – leaping around to different movement games and measuring our heart rates. The Star children also cut up their own snacks and learnt about hand washing to get rid of germs. Lots of action songs and story times inside to support good language development and lots of children have enjoyed pumpkin craft and exploration ahead of Halloween during half term!
We also learnt about Diwali in circle time as this is one of the celebrations that families at pre-school enjoy, we heard some amazing fireworks on Tuesday evening in the town while Andrea, Eva and I were attending evening first aid training here!
As we move towards the end of this half term we are really pleased with how the children have settled and will look forward to returning for our lead up to Christmas! We hope you all have a lovely half term break and that you all stay safe and happy and healthy.
We plan many trips over the year and had our first explore this week with a wonderful harvest themed trip to our local church St Andrews. The children walked beautifully up the to church, looking and listening for cars and tractors, looking out for poo …
We have enjoyed our farm shop role play outside – we set up a shop and a little areas for our pretend animals! Using pink balloons for the pigs in our pen and white for the sheep pen! We loved meeting Claire’s chicken on Monday …
Another great week at pre-school – full of exciting activities and circle times, inspiring the children to learn and to engage with imaginative ideas!
The Sun and Moon circle groups have enjoyed a real range of brilliant ideas – we have made volcanoes, coloured water, made puffy paint in the microwave, puffy caterpillars and milk fireworks, fizzy water in the soda stream, exploring sounds and gravity outside by the brook, used the plasma ball and tiny printer after taking photos of ourselves!
The Star group has grown this week with the new starters and they have settled well, their circle times have involved exploring magnets, cornflour and colour play, the plasma ball and projector, a bicarb and vinegar experiment, magic painting with crayons, playing with conkers and the treasure basket and colour mixing with foam!
The children have also worked on hand strength with dough disco and cooked their own snack! Each Tuesday the children will be able to take part in making the snack recipe – we made lots of our own items to ensure we meet all allergy and dietary preferences and this week we made blueberry flapjack!
Next week our circle times will be based on Autumn with lots of ideas for craft and learning and numbers and shapes too! We can cover so many areas of learning with our ideas!
We will be learning about food next week as well, where it comes from and we will be setting up a farm shop outside and would love donations of any vegetables like potatoes and peppers, leeks or carrot to enhance our play!
We will hopefully have a real chicken come in to visit next week for the children to see and lots of fun games outside to support learning about food, where it comes from and the animals. If you visit a farm shop at the weekend please can you take photos of the shop or the animals there and we can print them off for inspiration.
We have had our AGM and formed a new committee and a big thank you to everyone who attended and volunteered for roles – we are very grateful and we have our first committee meeting on Monday!
Another amazing week settling 9 new children in and with beautiful autumn sunshine to help us! Our Forest School sessions have been bathed in autumn light and our garage and our mini mechanics have been super busy fixing and cleaning our bikes outside. Our circle …