We have had a wonderful week full of activities and fun

Exercise – balloon catching, football, making coloured bubbles in puddles, sporty mini sessions, bean bag games, rocket ballons and stampy rockets flying high into the sky. In circle times we have also been working on movement with dough gym to build strength in our hands and arms, and playing games where the children use straws, lie on the floor and blow feathers to make them move, crawling along to follow the feather – all fantastic exercise for our bodies!

Maths – number work on Andrea’s giant phone (see facebook for the photo!), lots of pattern work in circle times – animal pattern matching, repeating pattern work making bracelets and brick patterns, using our bodies to make patterns and copying them,  shape resources out on the tables every morning to familiarise ourselves with the names and characteristics of the shapes – we went on a shape hunt in reception and along our path finding lots of shapes in our environment.

We have following the children’s lead – exploring ice outside, spending time in our growing garden and our sensory garden where we spotted a caterpillar.

Our garden centre has been busy with children enjoying the shop style role play, buying and selling the pots and flowers are gardening gloves and we will be building on this next week with planting more bulbs together and tidying up the growing garden.

We had role play inside as well, our real home corner with real plates and cups and mugs which helps to build arm strength. The children have loved using the laminated photos of meals and this has been a great conversation starter for us, helping us continue to chat about healthy foods and treats. We have completed our fruit tally for the week – which is up on the board outside reception and next week we will be counting dairy items in our lunches.

We would love donations of compost and bulbs, string, shaving foam (not gel) and watering cans please to support our planning.

Next week we will be continuing with our maths work, one of the lovely parts of our job is to develop a love for Maths and to make sure that children have no negative feelings about any area of learning. Our teaching is hidden in all sorts of games and activities, all designed to inspire the children and promote progress. A course that I did recently highlighted that Maths is essential, we use Maths all the time in our lives and children learn the concepts in so many ways – learning about patterns and shapes, how to recognise faces and buildings using those shapes and patterns, understanding size – shoe size, size of a spoon – small for yoghurt, bigger for serving food for example, sizes of pieces of fruit – blueberries are smaller that oranges and shape – oranges are spheres and so are footballs.

Next week we are going to be learning about animals – making factsheets and drawing pictures and using non fiction books, we will also be keeping warm outside with obstacle courses and riding the bikes. More gardening and exploring technology inside as well.

What a wonderful week full of singing our Christmas songs and having a dress rehersal for our performance.

Our circle times have been full of Christmas fun and games and we have made lots and lots of Christmas decorations to bring home. We hope you have all received your home made Xmas tree from your child and their Christmas card for you.

Our sun room table has been a hive of Christmas cooking, with snowman biscuits and Christmas pudding biscuits which I am certain were more popular than my favourite – the cucumber Christmas trees!

The Forest School groups on Thursday spent their session inside, sheltering from the sideways rain but loved making their mini wooden Father Christmas discs, learning how to saw wood and use the tools safely with Jackie and Sophie.

Props have been made, lots of dancing and singing and we had visitors from another setting on Tuesday who came in their Christmas jumpers and made some lovely new friends! Children always enjoy meeting new people and they were confident and really nosy! The feedback from those visitors was wonderful – they remarked on how happy and relaxed the children were, how well we teach them and listen to them and they found our setting to be a really calm, happy and wonderful place to be – just how we feel!

Don’t forget that we are CLOSED on Tuesday – we will all be at the Community Centre, ready to welcome your children to our party 9AM and then 12.30PM. We will have the mobile in case of any problems. Have a lovely weekend

We have enjoyed a week full of dancing and singing and putting on performances with our theatre role play – we are hoping to build lots of confidence ahead of our Christmas performances. We have played a really great range of songs from favourite movies and we have had a lot of fun, dressing up as characters and learning the words to songs and new dance moves!

This week has been a really interesting week of learning, we started the week with Diwali celebrations, making Rangoli patterns in many different ways and learning about the story of Rama and Sita. We have ended the week by learning about Pudsey Bear and we have talked about how he helps to raise money to keep children safe and happy and healthy. Thank you to everyone who has made a donation into our Pudsey pot.

In the middle of our celebrations we have also had a focus on literacy. This is a key are for the children and our aim is to foster a love of reading and story time. There are many ways in which we do this – this week we have had a different story sack each morning, we repeat stories at lunchtimes to ensure that all children get to know a book really well and can talk about the characters and remember the key words and parts of the story. The children will learn many skills with us over the year in this area. Next week we will be learning about fairy tales – including building our own beanstalk in the Sun room.

We really hope everyone is feeling better soon and that the advice we have shared has been useful over the week.

Outside we have been cosy in our reading corner, enjoying story time in small groups and keeping track of who we have read to there while other children have been working hard on our obstacle courses, keeping warm by moving and challenging themselves.

Forest School has been a great success again, along with Robot Reg coming to visit – the Sun and Moon groups really do have an exciting Thursday/Friday session! Sadly we had to cancel our trip to Willowbank School on Thursday but we will try to rearrange that.

Christmas plans are coming along, the new play has been written by Andrea and I have lots of post its from her on my desk with her Christmas ideas! We would love donations of the following items please to support her vision!

Pool noodle, white, brown and pale blue sheets, paper plates, large pieces of cardboard, tinsel, wrapping paper and wrapping ribbon, shiny paper and long cardboard tubes please!

We will start to practice the songs over the coming weeks so you may hear some Christmassy singing soon!