We had a very eventful start to our week with our Ofsted Inspection! Flo was lovely and thank you to everyone who chatted to her in the queue and send in messages and comments on Tapestry, we felt very proud indeed reading what you had written and listening to Flo when she gave us her feedback at the end of a very long day! We have to wait until the report is published which can take up to 30 working days which is a long time! We hope to have a draft report through in 18 working days and we will be looking forward to reading Flo’s comments.

A busy week with home visits and school stay and play sessions and we will be talking to the children about moving to Primary School now, we don’t start that too early as it can be unsettling as it is such a long time until September! This week we will be talking about lots of skills we need for school in our circle times.

We enjoyed our Costa role play working on building fine and gross motor strength and confidence to use new vocab and role play.

On the astro we laid out a lovely new musical play area – a new idea where we explore sounds with the children, copying and matching and repeating the sounds they make and use different items to make music such as junk modelling and blocks and large drums!

We also spent our circle times learning about the caterpillar and butterfly life cycle with lots of different activities and looking at our caterpillars – they are growing very quickly!

Our theatre role play inside was amazing too, some incredible performances and dancing, I will try and find some to load onto Tapestry for you to see as the children loved being recorded and watching themselves afterwards! Lots of independence with dressing up and finding shoes and putting the clothes away at the end of each session.

We have had a wonderful week outside in the sunshine on our pre-school farm! The pigs have been cared for, the sheep have been sheared and the fields tended to! We have planted vegetables and washed muddy pigs, milked cows and made a scarecrow – which scares us every so often as we think someone has stayed outside when the bell has rung and not come in!

On the sun table we have been creating and making books together, writing our own stories, forming letters, drawing pictures and learning about titles and page numbers, we have seen some incredible work and really detailed pictures and imaginative stories.

Our circle times have been really great fun this week, super active and energetic and competitive with a focus on physical development – activities have included long jump, balloon keepy uppy’s, balancing balls on cones and racing games, balloon balancing, bean bag challenges, action songs, balancing on planks and transporting a ball with teamwork, bean bag hoop challenge, moving under hoops, ribbon movement, animal action songs and ring gales and parachute games too! Some lovely photos on the parent gallery for these circle times!

Outside has been our farmyard and farm house and we have some wonderful observations of role play.

We will be clearing the farm up today and creating a big water play area on the top patio for next week, along with a physical challenge area and construction and junk modelling on the main astro area.

We will also be welcoming Nigel back, our tennis coach who led a session for the sun and moon groups this week which was a great success!

Next week is the last week before a half term break and the following half term is much longer at 7 weeks and 1 day – we will be holding our graduation celebration for our children who are leaving for primary school on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th July in the afternoon from 2.30pm and more info will follow later next term.

Welcome back to all our families and to a new family who have joined us this term having moved to Cullompton.

As we start the summer term we are learning which schools the children have been allocated and starting to think about planning our register for the Autumn Term 2025! Our New Parents Evening will be on Wednesday 4th June so we will be contacting families to book hours in for next year over the coming weeks.

We have returned to a very happy pre-school – the children are rested after their break and we have been tiring them out with lots of pirate play outside which has been really fun and imaginative. We have also had a little tidy up and have explored water play with mini pirate boats and have been searching for home made treasure and making treasure chests as well.

Our overall theme has been pirates to see if this is inspiring the children which it has! Next week we will extend this to support pirate games and activities in circle times with Maths/Numbers as a focus – counting treasure for example! The children have worked together this week to create the ship, come up with ideas for the water play, walked the plank and played new games which involves listening and learning new rules.

Disco Thursday has been replaced by Mindful Thursday and it was an incredible start to the sessions….you could hear a pin drop which is extremely rare at pre-school as you can imagine! I started with breathing exercises to calm, then a technique which involves running your finger along your arm and down and around the fingers on your hand and it was a very lovely moment to see all the children (27!!) watching me and copying my actions and then carefully following my lead in silence! Then I stood on a chair and blew bubbles while the children sat still and allowed them to fall onto their laps or clothes and not leap around to catch them, again they were mesmerised by just sitting and watching and feeling the bubbles and we finished with more slow breathing before starting very quietly to wash hands for lunch. There is a pic of me on the chair in the gallery so do show your children and we would love to hear any comments – it’s a new session so we will see how it goes but a BIG change from singing and dancing to loud music!

Our circle times have had a technology focus, online safety is really important and I would like to direct you to a new section on the website and on Tapestry in Documents for your info. There are so many positives to technology and digital media in our homes and to using devices with and without screens – a couple of rules that we support are that children should not use tablets on their own without supervision, should not access You Tube alone and although it seems very early to think about online safety it is a vital skills for our young people. We will be generating advice sheets and sharing knowledge from training courses that we complete as well to build a set of documents to support this area.

Our circles have been really fun, using the ipad for facetiming parents, chatting to the group in the other room, programming work, looking at remotes and cameras and old phones, making a pretend tablet and choosing apps from a paper app store, talking about what the picture represent and what the app is for, taking photos and videos of each other, printing pics out with a tiny printer, using our Yoto and walkie talkies!

Our Sun table has had a “senses” focus using delicious fruit for taste, mystery smelling jars for smell, different textures and mystery boxes for touch, sounds games for hearing and all of the above for sight!

Next week we will continue the Pirate theme, have a chatter box full of interesting items for the sun table, lots of Maths inside and outside and puzzles and another mindful Thursday session!