One of our favourite weeks of the year – our butterflies appeared over the weekend with the warm weather and we released them into the Forest School garden on Tuesday afternoon, with a lovely party and picnic and story and face paint! The children absolutely loved watching the butterflies fly away and there are extra videos and photos on Tapestry for you to have a look at with the children too, so sorry to anyone who missed out on that afternoon but once they emerge the butterflies have to be released in a couple of days.

Our circle focus has been numbers this week, and we have created lots of different games and activities to support learning and we have lots of brilliant observations to share with the key workers as they start to complete the special book ready for giving to families at the graduation celebration at the end of the term.

The Sun and Moon groups have been representing numbers, counting and subitising, linking numerals to amounts, tricky bingo, shape and number cutting games, making and adding big numbers using numicon, knocking down a tower and counting how many bricks fell and adding two totals together and also looking at how clocks use numbers too.

The Star children have also been working on their number skills too, they have had a number hunt, shape and number sorting tray in foam, counting wooden blocks, and number songs! The Stars have had Forest School sessions on Thurs and Fri am and the photos are so wonderful!

We have visited St Andrew’s School this week for a lovely trip which the children enjoyed and two teachers from Willowbank have also visited us too so the feeling of a transition ahead is real!

We have been building rivers with planks and gutters and tubes all week which has been great for imaginative play and solving problems and for getting very wet!

Inside we have been exploring colour and making rainbows all week, ready to use in our display for the fete on Saturday! Come along and support us – 11.30am – 2pm – so much to do and eat and drink and enjoy and we hear the weather will be great too!

Welcome back to the second half of the summer term! We are in Week 6 and looking forward to a wonderful half term ahead, ending with our graduation celebration for children that are leaving us to go onto school and to meeting new families and siblings of current and past children back to pre-school. Please let friends and family know that we are currently taking registrations for the Autumn Term!

We have had a great start and have spent our week exploring mini beasts in circle times ahead of our caterpillars arriving!

Star – played a minibeast info game, drawn spiders, made butterflies, enjoyed the hungry caterpillar story sack, explored a minibeast tray, made mini beasts out of playdoh, played bug bingo and counted legs and spotted wings!

Sun and Moon – played bug bingo, played a big drawing games, explored the sensory garden and growing garden, learning about the new plants and looking for bugs, counted bugs and enjoyed a mini beast clue game, drawing and colouring in the mini beasts and bugs and made bug hotels for the sensory garden!

Forest School has re started and the Moons attend on a Thursday am and Suns on a Friday am for the next two weeks – then we welcome the Star group out to Forest School to familiarise them with the rules ahead of them turning into Sun and Moon children in September! Then a final session each for Moons and Suns in Week 5 and 6.

We have also spent time this week looking at lots of photos – of the children and their families, looking at the special books and circle time photos and the photos that you have shared with us too.

Outside we have used the wonderful petals you have collected to make perfume and sun catchers, we have planted some seeds and used our physical skills to conquer the different obstacle courses and challenges in the garden.

Next week we will be enjoying musical play outside and our costa coffee role play. Our summer fete is coming up so we will be practising performing so that the children are confident for our singing at the fete so we will have a stage inside with lots of dressing up and will be developing independence too – dress ourselves, put clothes back on the hangers, find our own shoes etc!

We would love donations for theatre role play – any wigs or funny sunglasses and hats!

Our Pre-School has turned into a farm yard this week inside and outside! We have built a wonderful farm yard and a big home corner for the farm house too. Lots of lovely role play and chatter in the garden and we have made resources inside to support the play – a cow and a pig and some chicks for our hen house. We have built a tractor outside too with loose parts which has been a great success.

We have some Farmer’s Weekly magazines and lots of leaflets as well to promote new vocabulary and learning and conversations.

Inside we have been practising our scissor skills and had our green playdoh out with the farm animals and creating items for the farm outside.

Our circle times for the Stars have been farm based too to support the role play and learning.
Stars – have talked about life on the farm, animals and their babies, sorting jungle animals and farm animals and read the Farmer Duck story and chatted about jobs on the farm and played guess the sound of the animal too – lovely for listening and attention skills!

Sun and Moons have had a focus on letters and their sounds – listening to sounds and learning to blend them ahead of learning to read at school!

Matching sounds and items, picking out all the items that begin with an S or T, understanding rhyming words and learning to blend sounds.

We have also had a wonderful trip to the Fire Station for the Moon group on Thursday and these photos will be in a separate gallery on the blog and learnt a little about VE Day at an age appropriate level with a little picnic and face painting celebration in our back garden with bunting.

Mindful Thursday continued to be super relaxing and quiet and we have been showing people around pre-school this week who we hope will join us in the Autumn and the current children are always super nosy with new people!!

We hope you have a lovely weekend and enjoy the sunshine and we will be continuing with our farmyard and we will have some tennis coaching on Monday morning and we have a Bags 2 School collection booked for Friday 16th May so please feel free to drop bags off from Monday morning. All bags will be weighed and pre-school are paid an amount per kilo which goes into fund raising for new resources.