Our pirate play has been great fun this week – we have used the children’s interest in this theme to lead counting and maths work in our group times which has worked brilliantly!

Stars have been playing pop up pirate and counting the swords and taking turns, they have counted Pirate treasure and counted gems and started to learn to recognise numbers. The Stars have learnt a pirate counting song and explored pirate patterns and counting using dice.

The Sun and Moon groups have received letters from Pirate Pete, reading their names and the numbers inside and counting out gold coins, they have played a game where they roll a dice and carry out the pirate action for that number, played “What’s the time Mr Pirate” and played a canon ball water balloon game, counting how many they managed to make splash me!

We love building all the learning goals into fun activities and to hearing what has been happening in your families too and one idea has led to a whole week of planning! One family sent in a video and photos of sheep shearing so we are going to set up a farm yard in our garden! We would love any donations of farm leaflets, tractor magazines or anything else you think we could use! Photos from farm visits, leaflets of farm days out perhaps or photos of animals you spot while out on a walk!

Our chatter box has been popular on the table, we have added a photo onto facebook and on Tapestry as well for you to see the array of interesting items that the staff found to bring in!

Outside we have been working on our Maths – we have been counting and collecting natural items and laying them out on the patio in number order. We have made a big clock on the fence and used sprayers to spray numbers on cars and played lots of pirate games too! Canonball games, made eye patches and pirate flags and walked the plank – a lot!

Our second mindful Thursday was wonderful! Peaceful, breathing activities in the group, feeling the bubbles land on us and then gently catching the feathers, one each before washing hands for lunch.

We hope everyone has a lovely bank holiday weekend and see you all on Tuesday.

Colour explosions at pre-school this week! We have really enjoyed creating and mixing and choosing and learning new vocabulary for colours and learning about prime colours and which colours mix! The circle times have been really imaginative and exciting for the children and we hope we have created a new generation of artists!!

Star – this group have mixed colours and made handprints, mixed coloured water, made coloured mashed potato, matched objects by colour, mixed shaving foam and colours to make pictures and used the pipettes to drop colour onto cotton wool

Sun and Moon – these groups have mixed paint on a big scale on bubble wrap over tables, used shaving foam to make marble pictures, used the curly pipettes to add water to paint to make green and purple and orange and mixed colours in jars, learnt a colour magic trick and sorted colours and made their own mini rainbow book marks!

Our welcome tray has been full of beautiful transient art, we have loved dough disco on the sun table first thing and spring playdoh on the round table.

The sun table has been a hub for Science Week – lots of amazing experiments, learning together to follow the instructions on Pinterest, comparing our outcomes with the photos and videos and talking about the ingredients we have used, the vocabulary for the reactions and it has been a really popular activity.

Outside has also been very busy with the nice warm sunshine! We have set up a group of chairs and left the children to lead the play based on journeys – some lovely child led ideas with an adult there to support and extend – including a plane flight to the seaside, a bus to the beach, a bus to each other’s homes, a bus trip to Bear Town, a trip to Disneyland on a plane and a flight to Australia and even a rollercoaster! We will continue this next week inside with the whole sun room being used as a train – please send in photos of any trains you may have and books and trips and leaflets please!

The activity lead outside has also been having fun with the children playing playground games together – teaching them What’s the Time Mr Wolf and Duck, Duck, Goose – playing football and parachute games and hide and seek too.

Next week we will be enjoying Easter craft, learning about trains and journeys, 3D shapes and numbers, and unpacking our new big blocks that we have paid for with our fund raising efforts – thank you to our committee of parents!! We have our Bingo on Saturday night and our wonderful summer fete on the 28th June and a shopping list in draft form on my laptop ready to go!

This has been a very busy week at pre-school! We have been out to the library for two trips, Carole came on Tuesday for a story massage session, Robot Reg has visited us and we have dressed up for World Book Day. (Friday photos are downloaded after the blog has been written so will feature in the following week’s gallery)

The week has been so much fun and the children have loved asking us all about our characters and looking at books together. The children behaved beautifully on both Library trips and the library were really welcoming and helpful and we enjoyed the trail and their storytime.

Promoting a love of reading is so important, and can be a significant part of life long learning skills and academic progress and we have been making observations across the week of how the children have engaged with stories, using story sacks and props, acting stories out in the garden and using our lovely story stage as a base and it has been so popular!

Inside we have been making some fire fighter craft to support role play, and we have had the dressing up out as well to promotor independence in putting outfits on, ahead of school in a few months where children need to be able to change for PE!

Each circle time has had a literacy focus with lots of stories and one day of making pancakes on Tuesday!
We have learnt about Ramadan and ended the week with a wonderful facetime call to a teacher in Kuwait who teaches Arabic and was able to talk to us about why Ramadan is important and to show us some of the food she will eat later after dusk and her lanterns and other decorations – it was quite emotional in fact to really learn properly and to bring it all to life for the children, she asked their names and they were really confident to chat and loved looking at her items. Please have a look on Facebook and tapestry for some photos from this special moment as we took them on the ipad.

Robot Reg has returned this Thurs and Fri afternoons and next week we will welcome Alfie from the Football Fun Factory.

We will be learning about routes and patterns next week and would love you to email photos in from your weekend – a photo of your house and front door please for circle times and any photos of shops and places in our town as well.

Outside next week we are learning about dinosaurs and fossils so will become explorers!

Thank you to everyone who has handed in their sponsor form for the bike ride next week, we are looking forward to helping the children to complete their laps over the course of next week.