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.

We have started to welcome our new children to pre-school with session visits happening! This is a really exciting time for us and for the new families – and the current cohort are always super nosy, coming to say hello!

We have been learning about animals this week as the lovely Marie from Animals 2 U is coming on Friday this week and Thursday next week for the school starter groups. This is a lovely experience and a real treat for the children. We will load the photos onto Tapestry for you to see after each visit.

Outside we have had our lovely home corner and the mud kitchen out! Lots of very muddy children who have had a wonderful time making mud pies!

Our circle times have been based on learning about our world – with a focus on taking care of the planet and the animals and habitats that exist on it.

The star group have been making an ocean habitat, sorting animals into land, sea and ice habitats, making animal sensory trays and singing lots of animal songs and animal boogie dancing!

The Sun and Moons have drawn animals and habitats, looked up different animals and learnt about which live in the rainforest and which live on plains, they have watched a few videos of animals in their habitats, sorted them and also learnt about weather and there are some lovely videos of weather forecasting on Tapestry!

There will be fewer photos this week and next I’m afraid as we finish the special books for the school starters and have those ready for graduation.

We have also been reading some fairy tales, created some lovely animal craft including lions and turtles, panda’s and parrots!

Next week we will continue to learn about our world, adding in all the areas of learning – we will learn about the planet, dance around the world, music around the world, food and stories and communities and animals!