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.

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!

Welcome to all our new and returning families, it has been a pleasure to welcome you all and to settle the children in! They are amazing!

We are so proud of how they have settled in and I know there are a few tears but these soon stop once we have a cuddle and start to play and they have made so much progress already, learning the routine and the environment, joining in with circle time and singing and exploring and making friends. The Star children from last year are settling into their new Sun and Moon groups, making friends and enjoying being back.

As a staff team we are thrilled with the groups and will be working hard to get to know all the children, seeing what progress they make and building relationships with you all.

We start the new year with simple and relaxing activities, collage, painting, car play, bikes and home corner, some family role play, stories and singing, lunchtime routines and having snack. The helps to settle the children as we have lots of time to sit with them and help them explore. We start to listen in to their interests and write observations to help with our planning. Next week we are going to use jobs as a theme as the children really liked playing with the cars and other vehicles so think this will be really fun – starting with building a fire engine outside for role play and we will also have dressing up inside with a theatre and music, dancing and singing so let us know of any favourite movies or songs!

Your key person will be in touch via Tapestry so let us know if you have any issues with the app or logging in and accidents and other observations and memo’s will come out regularly.

We hope you are all feeling more settled after a whole week if you have new children starting and we look forward to a great year ahead.