Our focus this week has been literacy and Disco Thursday has made a return! The children love to dance and move and this builds confidence and strength. We had a lovely email last week from one of the local schools praising the children who started last September and letting us know the gross motor strength and co-ordination are key skills so we will be working hard on those areas over the coming months for all children.

Our planning has included exploring technology this week and sensory play in the afternoons, we have made a new letter tray each morning and the children have made some wonderful junk modelling creations which built on our teaching last week. They are an excellent group for playing and creating and sharing ideas and working together.

The Stars have been learning new rhymes and songs and moving lots and dancing and enjoying playing instruments. We have lots of lovely observations for them this week for the key workers.

The Sun and Moons have been working hard on recognising letters and listening to their sounds and this is the beginnings of them understanding letters make up words that can be read and sounded out. Pen grip is really important for writing so when you are at home making lists or drawing please correct your child’s pen grip – I will load a photo of a good pen grip onto Tapestry for you to have a look at!

The activities have included drawing and writing letters for our little Cully Bear, matching items to letter sounds, recognising the letter and the beginning of their name and being able to sound it out. Matching sounds to letters and writing those letters and using ideas from an old friend Robot Reg in our circle times.

Shared story reading is a really valuable tool for promoting language and literacy and a great time for promoting new vocabulary. We read every lunchtime and every afternoon, often repeating favourite books and talking about the stories too.

We have set up a multi cultural shop undercover which has kept us entertained on the rainy days and we would love more packaging for the shop please, ideally from around the world!

To promote exercise we have played games in the garden, and enjoyed garden club – digging and tidying our growing garden this week.

Next week we will be learning about Chinese New Year and trying lots of different foods from around the world, thank you for the donations from our families and if you have any other ideas for snack time from your homes and cultures for us we would love to hear them! amelia@cullomptonpreschool.org

Please keep an eye out for notifications from Tapestry – please do ensure you have those turned on as your key person has chosen the area for home learning/next steps for this half term and these will all come via the Tapestry app as an observation. We would love your feedback on the idea and any photos of you playing with your child using our ideas!

We have had a really special week with our Nativity and Christmas Party day on Wednesday – it was a really wonderful experience for the children and we will add the party photos onto a separate gallery for you to view. Thank you to everyone who came to watch!

Our normal week has been a really happy one as well with a really emotional trip to the Culm Valley Care Home. The children were wonderful and sang beautifully and we met Hilda who is 100! She was amazing and chatted to the children – all of the residents had reindeer hats on and clapped and joined in and they looked after us really well – thank you to the parents that came along to help us walk there. We also explored the interactive noticeboards around the church, using my phone to scan the QR code to bring the Lego characters from the Bible to life! It was great fun and a new experience for us all!

We have continued with out learning objectives during circle times and free flow play and have covered counting, listening and attention games, making gingerbread, Christmas wreaths, explored our Christmas Ice sensory trays, we made playdoh snowmen, salt dough handprints and made lots of different foods for snack including watermelon Christmas Trees and pizza Christmas trees!

Outside we have been keeping warm and using our strong legs on the bikes and climbing equipment, played with balloons left over from the party day and tidied up and played with our mud kitchen.

The sun and moon groups have had their last Forest School session of 2024 and will start again in January with Suns on a Thursday and Moons on the Friday morning. Thank you to Sophie, Eva and Louise C for a wonderful experience over the last term – it is a truly magical time for the children.

Next week we are open for 3 days and Wednesday 18th is our last day of term. This will be the last blog of 2024!  We look forward to wishing you all a very happy Christmas as we say farewell to you next week and a Happy and healthy and safe New Year to all our families!

We had a very exciting SNOW DAY on Thursday this week – we were able to get outside and enjoy the snow while it fell and then come in to warm ourselves up. It was our first ever Forest School session in the snow, we had an explore and the fire and hot chocolate and then came in to defrost and join our friends in the normal session. We apologise for needing to send the Star group home for the PM session – once Cullompton Community College and Willowbank School closed we were unable to meet our ratio for the Star group as we had a number of staff that needed to leave to collect their own children. We will ensure you are offered another session to replace the one you missed and you will receive an email from Mandy about that next week.

Our focus this week during our circle times has been maths – but not just numbers, we have been learning about patterns and there are so many Maths skills that are really important for life skills. Maths skills are essential and a building block for life and Maths is also an area that can cause worry – you often hear people saying “I’m no good at Maths” but Maths is everywhere! Timetables, patterns, routines, shapes, size, capacity, numbers, counting, estimating, guessing, we use shape and pattern to recognise places we visit, faces we look at, directions, layout of a shop or library, to learn about distance and orientation. We work hard to build a love of Maths, solving problems and feeling really confident.

Star circle – matching shapes and sizes, learning about one more and one less with numbers, colour matching and sorting colours, reading number stories and learning number songs and looking at animal patterns.

Sun and Moon – we have worked on repeating patterns, motivating mistakes and correcting them, playing lots of fun games and having competitions and races. Sorting colour beads and counters and making patterns as a team, working together to match colours for a pattern and making shape pictures, looking at numbers on a giant phone and matching the numbers and the order of numbers. The groups have also learnt about measuring too! We will continue with maths for another week, collecting really good observations for the children so that we know where to go next with their learning.

Outside we have enjoyed a theatre role play area and we will be bringing that inside next week, supporting the children to grow in confidence before our Nativity which we have now started to practice!

Our literacy trays have been lovely this week and the collection of photos will appear on Tapestry at the end of the series for inspiration for home learning! You should all have had a note from your key person by now to let you know when they have time to work on learning journeys and please add observations (not messages) for any info you would like to share and this can form part of your child’s learning journey.

Next week more Christmas activities will begin to appear at pre-school, cinema role play, a sleigh outside with a cosy Xmas book area in the gingerbread house and a yoga and chill out zone in the Moon room!