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.

Welcome back after the half term break – we hope you all had a happy and healthy week off. We are back into preschool life – full of Bonfire Night chat, stories from home and learning about space. We use the themes or subject as an umbrella to teach our curriculum – the themes are the HOW and the curriculum is the WHAT – this means we use our imaginations and creativity to plan activities and games and circles and outside play and choose WHAT areas we need to teach because we know where children are with progress and this gives us the WHY!

We are always coming up with new ideas and listen to the children carefully about their interests, while also stretching their experiences and range of knowledge to help us provide lots to engage them.

This week using space as a theme, we have enjoyed role play (making friends, communication skills and turn taking), building a big rocket outside (physical development and planning how to do it and what we need), creating a space control centre (communication, maths, new ideas, technology) and decorating our area with crafts and planets and non fiction books (literacy, creative work, colour, new vocab).

We have also had a literacy focus too – while we are getting to know the children we often write observations to help us see the areas of strength and an area to focus on – we may need more observations or that child may need time away from the larger groups to share what they know.

In our circle times this week :-

Star – took part in firework arts and conversation, learnt a planet song and enjoyed “Whatever Next” the story about a bear who goes off to Space. The Star group have made their own space display and watched a rocket launch too. Covering literacy with story sacks Gingerbread Man and Billy Goats Gruff – also making their own gingerbread men.

Sun and Moon groups – acted out a space adventure story, being astronauts landing on the moon, making up the story as we go and sharing ideas in our groups. The children have been so focused on creating name rockets, recognising letters in their names, looking at space books and the space question book, making space stations from Lego after looking at the ISS photos. They have played letter bingo and were amazing at that and watched and learnt a solar system song and made a rocket and planets.

We will be continuing our space play next week, more literacy work and mark making and we would love donations of the following items – Glass jars with lids, cotton wool balls, foil (we will recycle the foil) and big plastic water bottles and some big cardboard if possible please?

Forest School groups have now swapped so the Moons go on a Thursday and Suns on a Friday. Another wonderful session today with new children taking part for the first time.

Next week we will be learning about the important work that the charity Children in Need do, we keep it simple and talk about how Pudsey keeps children safe and helps children who are unwell. We will be following the Children In Need theme and will be dressing up in pink or spotty clothes and would love to see any children dressed up too! You do not need to buy anything, we will be ready to offer spotty Pudsey face paint in the morning and we will be playing games all day and dancing away.