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.

Our highlights of the week were our two Grandparent Mornings! We welcomed 11 grandparents each day and the children really enjoyed themselves and we were able to show the families our circle times and then had a nice cuppa and off for a little explore!

We have been working hard on our physical strength all week and our circle times have been full of laughter and competition and new skills have been acquired.

Star circle – the children have enjoyed lots of music and movement games this week, along with Peppa Pig movement ideas, animal movements and ball skills. Moving over and under hoops, dancing with ribbons and jumping, kicking, rolling and banana banana dancing and dough disco! What a busy week!

Sun and Moon circle – more work on building strength through games such as bean bag challenges, ball passing games, action moves and a brick transporting game carrying heavy buckets! They have learnt how to use the stilts and enjoyed a Forest School session as well in the winter sunshine.

Outside we have been tidying up our bikes, adding new numbers and giving them a clean. We have collected up all our trucks and cars and had a sort out together and built a bike obstacle course and made a train station as well. Lots of lovely vocabulary and play and team work.

Our role play shop has continued this week and the children have really been able to help to tidy it so that it is ready for the next session!

Vet role play has been very popular in the sun room with lots of fantastic language and extending the learning taking place and we have started to look at mini beasts and life cycles very simply ahead of next week when we will be concentrating on it.

Our nurture groups are lovely and we have some great observations from them which really helps the key person with their learning journeys.

Next week is our last week before February Half Term and we will have a garden club outside, more exercise and games and some flower craft inside and life cycle and minibeast topics too. We would love donations of bulbs to plant and some compost please!

We have had a really busy week, enjoying exercise outside which has included football, gross motor bingo, balloon catch and riding the bikes.

Our Costa role play has been lovely and the staff have been able to support that all week, coming up with vocabulary and ideas and helping the children to learnt o take care of the props and take turns and chat to each other and some lovely independent play was able to be developed. We are changing the Costa to a mini supermarket next week and would love a wide range of items to sell – empty packaging, lots of different kinds of boxes, any packaging with different languages on would be brilliant and any interesting foods from around the world would be good too. No glass please and nothing with food inside or anything that did have nuts inside but a range of boxes and packets would be brilliant.

Inside we have enjoyed science week on the sun table! Lots of experiments and exploring the concepts of gravity and weight, floating and sinking, making volcanoes and if you have a look at our facebook you will see one experiment that really didn’t work! During our planning session we found “Biro leaves” – it is a perfect example of Pinterest vs real life!! Luckily it is an important skill to be able to make a mistake, try and solve a problem and manage our feelings when something goes wrong and even more luckily all our staff a great role models!!

Our circle times have had a focus on shapes, we are working on next steps for the children and ideas for home learning for areas too and will be sharing these after our key person meeting on Monday evening. Writing observations and sharing information really helps each staff member work out where a child is developmentally and where we can go next – either as a challenge for them or an area for nurture.

The Sun and Moons have enjoyed a shape hunt outside, played shape bingo, matched and sorted 2 D shapes, explored shapes within shapes for a matching pairs game, made 2 D shapes from lollipops, played a shape stepping stone game, completed a task to match all the shapes on a shape bus and played a shape monster sorting game too!

Forest School has been a bit damp but enjoyable this week and the Suns and Moons have settled into the new pattern really well. The children love to take turns to light the fire and Sophie had lots of lovely child led role play observations – 3 girls turned the willow dome into a stables for their ponies and unicorns, a group made a restaurant from the mud kitchen and another set up a food delivery service using the wheel barrow – delivering mud cup cakes to Sophie and Louise!

The Star group have also had a busy week, they have separated out for a few circles to ensure that all children are getting the right level of support to learn and sometimes being in a smaller group benefits them from a concentration perspective. Group leaders are planning carefully and circle supports will be making more observations too. The Stars have played matching the shape games, a shape corner game, made simple houses using shapes and matched different bricks on a big sheet of paper too -some lovely photos from the week!

Next week we are going to be junk modelling so donations of boxes and toilet rolls, tape and string would be lovely please and we will be concentrating on phonics and letters and sounds in our circle times in Sun and Moon and on music and dance and songs and rhymes in Star.

Have a lovely weekend – Amelia