The start of our week was a bit of a washout and our first fully wet days for a long time so we were all inside and undercover playing in our lovely shop and having a chill out zone with calm music in the Star room!

It was lovely to get back outside and we had a tidy up in our garden and set up lots of long car runs, using the steps and gutters and planks – rolling the cars along and working and playing together.

This week has been very special for one of our families who have been celebrating Chinese New Year so we have also been learning about this event, valuing the cultures of all our families is so wonderful and we have started to put the photos of your family around the world onto our big map so please keep sending them in. We have family pictures for Australia, China, New Zealand, USA and India so far! We will be making a UK version too after half term so will be adding to that display.

Our circle times have all been full of the wonderful colours of Chinese New Year, learning about the culture and the foods and the year of the Snake.

Star group – they have watched a video of a Chinese Dragon, dancing and moving and then made a dragon for their board in the Star room, they have painted snakes using bubble wrap, enjoyed sensory trays with foam and glitter getting very messy! The Stars have also made lanterns and sparkly firework and rocket pictures – really listening to the staff and taking in the learning – lots of skills have been on show – planning how to make a picture, using the resources on offer, taking time to make a creation, learning new vocabulary and hearing about and watching exciting videos of the dragon dancing.

Moon and Sun – have also had a week full of Chinese culture, they learnt all about how the Chinese New Year has an animal attached to each new year and we played lots of games to learn the animals and made some lovely snakes! The children learnt about Red being a lucky colour, learnt about the dragon being an important part of celebrations and we made our own big dragon and danced through the sun room to some Chinese music. We looked at the difference between Chinese symbols/writing and our letters and created badges with our age on in Chinese and painted some wonderful Chinese symbols.

The highlight of the week was our wonderful Chinese lunch! Delivered by the Golden Lion and it was delicious! The family also donated a beautiful new calendar and fortune cookies and other lovely pieces for our display which we will pack away today and have it all ready for next year’s celebrations!

We will keep our multicultural shop for next week as the children are playing really well and imaginatively so please do send in packaging for foods from around the world – if you have fajitas or Chinese or curry ready meal boxes!

Our focus for the next two weeks will be foods and life cycles and our garden and growth and change and being strong!

Welcome back to all our families – we hope you all had a happy and healthy and safe Christmas and New Year!

We have settled straight back into pre-school life with lots of lovely activities and chat this week, lots of stories about Christmas presents and we have used our circle time to remember our routines and rules and to learn about emotions too.

The hospital and baby weigh in clinic has been very busy inside, lots of future doctors, nurses and carers have been playing beautifully together, some brilliant ideas for how to take care of people who are ill and the staff have been brilliant at extending the play with new vocabulary and stretching the children’s imaginations. Luckily we have a lot of stethoscopes as they were the most popular prop!

To support this we also used our Understanding the world boxes for learning opportunities – using the dentist box, doctor sets, food and health and body books and our jobs box too. Lots of photos, books, stories and non fiction posters bring each area to life. We have high aspirations for the resources that we use here and work hard to come up with new ideas for our boxes so that they are fascinating and engaging. I am working on putting together a list of items that we would like to add and will send this out over this half term – often charity shops are a great place to pick up interesting items and Tesco is fantastic for sourcing non fiction books for the boxes!

Maths is a focus for this half term as well, starting with shapes and pattern work. Lots of exploring, putting shapes together to make pictures and searching for shapes in the word around us too.

Circle times have been all about how we feel, it has been really sweet to listen to the children talk about feelings and come out of circle time saying ” we have been talking about our emotions”.

Sun and Moon – these groups have talked about lots of feelings and explored what they look like, physical feelings when we feel sad or happy or cross, how our families affect our feelings and how we feel at pre-school too. We have covered friendships, how our faces look when we feel a certain emotion and what makes us happy or sad or cross or angry or scared or worried. Some brilliant observations from both groups – including the following comments “My mum makes me happy because she does so much for me” – ” My Mum makes me happy because she sings really good songs” – “sharing toys makes me happy” – “my Mummy makes me happy because she cooks lots of dinner for me”! They groups had a brilliant time drawing each other – a circle that is hard to explain but you will see the pics on Tapestry – using pens to draw on a plastic page, recreating a shocked or smiley face!

Star group – practised their circle time skills, listening and joining the circle, read stories about emotions and feeling happy or sad, the book – Rainbow Fish is about sharing too and the group made happy and sad faces using buttons and pasta and created some really detailed transient art, some lovely photos on the blog this week from the Stars.

Outside has given us a lot of inspiration with the ice and we spent the week playing with the children and following their lead to give us ideas for our planning – ideas include buses and transport, vets and animals, ice and learning about weather, looking at clouds for shapes.

Next week we will be spending time in circles learning about shapes, learning about the weather on the Sun table and about concepts such as floating and sinking, weight, gravity and enjoying some science experiments too! Outside we will be taking part in lots of movement and exercise to keep warm and developing our role play house into a costa coffee shop.

We have had a wonderful week in our theatre/cinema role play – please do look at the videos on tapestry as they are so lovely, full of fun and confidence and music and dancing and we really hope this will build confidence ahead of our performance at the Church on the 11th December.

Each staff member has been responsible for creating a literacy tray in the mornings and we have seen a really great range of imaginative trays and those will be posted on the activities section of Tapestry later and also on our facebook page. A great way for us to share examples of our planning with you to support home learning alongside the next steps you have been sent on Tapestry too. Don’t forget to log in and look and comment or like our observations and memos.

Our overall focus for our circles has been exploring maths – so many different activities have supported progress in the children’s learning.

Sun and Moon – We have counted ice cream cones, explored wood and plastic sets of Numicon

Numicon guide for parents – Oxford Owl for Home

We have also learnt about patterns, different ways to represent numbers, played musical numbers, counted jumps, recognised numbers and heights and measured feet, finding the right number for our size and counting in lots of creative and active and fun ways and the children have done brilliantly.

Stars – have enjoyed sorting pom poms into size, sorted large and small objects to learn about the concept of size and language, enjoyed counting songs, played a musical statue shape game, and played “silly soup” with numbers as well.

We have set up collage trays and Christmas stories and our sleigh outside is very popular and we have set up a little Christmas home corner as well and decorated our trees in each room.

Next week we will have a festive cafe inside and would love donations of cinnamon, ginger, Christmas paper plates and cups and hot chocolate and cotton wool balls and Christmas napkins please.