We have had a wonderful week outside in the sunshine on our pre-school farm! The pigs have been cared for, the sheep have been sheared and the fields tended to! We have planted vegetables and washed muddy pigs, milked cows and made a scarecrow – which scares us every so often as we think someone has stayed outside when the bell has rung and not come in!

On the sun table we have been creating and making books together, writing our own stories, forming letters, drawing pictures and learning about titles and page numbers, we have seen some incredible work and really detailed pictures and imaginative stories.

Our circle times have been really great fun this week, super active and energetic and competitive with a focus on physical development – activities have included long jump, balloon keepy uppy’s, balancing balls on cones and racing games, balloon balancing, bean bag challenges, action songs, balancing on planks and transporting a ball with teamwork, bean bag hoop challenge, moving under hoops, ribbon movement, animal action songs and ring gales and parachute games too! Some lovely photos on the parent gallery for these circle times!

Outside has been our farmyard and farm house and we have some wonderful observations of role play.

We will be clearing the farm up today and creating a big water play area on the top patio for next week, along with a physical challenge area and construction and junk modelling on the main astro area.

We will also be welcoming Nigel back, our tennis coach who led a session for the sun and moon groups this week which was a great success!

Next week is the last week before a half term break and the following half term is much longer at 7 weeks and 1 day – we will be holding our graduation celebration for our children who are leaving for primary school on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th July in the afternoon from 2.30pm and more info will follow later next term.

Welcome back to all our families and to a new family who have joined us this term having moved to Cullompton.

As we start the summer term we are learning which schools the children have been allocated and starting to think about planning our register for the Autumn Term 2025! Our New Parents Evening will be on Wednesday 4th June so we will be contacting families to book hours in for next year over the coming weeks.

We have returned to a very happy pre-school – the children are rested after their break and we have been tiring them out with lots of pirate play outside which has been really fun and imaginative. We have also had a little tidy up and have explored water play with mini pirate boats and have been searching for home made treasure and making treasure chests as well.

Our overall theme has been pirates to see if this is inspiring the children which it has! Next week we will extend this to support pirate games and activities in circle times with Maths/Numbers as a focus – counting treasure for example! The children have worked together this week to create the ship, come up with ideas for the water play, walked the plank and played new games which involves listening and learning new rules.

Disco Thursday has been replaced by Mindful Thursday and it was an incredible start to the sessions….you could hear a pin drop which is extremely rare at pre-school as you can imagine! I started with breathing exercises to calm, then a technique which involves running your finger along your arm and down and around the fingers on your hand and it was a very lovely moment to see all the children (27!!) watching me and copying my actions and then carefully following my lead in silence! Then I stood on a chair and blew bubbles while the children sat still and allowed them to fall onto their laps or clothes and not leap around to catch them, again they were mesmerised by just sitting and watching and feeling the bubbles and we finished with more slow breathing before starting very quietly to wash hands for lunch. There is a pic of me on the chair in the gallery so do show your children and we would love to hear any comments – it’s a new session so we will see how it goes but a BIG change from singing and dancing to loud music!

Our circle times have had a technology focus, online safety is really important and I would like to direct you to a new section on the website and on Tapestry in Documents for your info. There are so many positives to technology and digital media in our homes and to using devices with and without screens – a couple of rules that we support are that children should not use tablets on their own without supervision, should not access You Tube alone and although it seems very early to think about online safety it is a vital skills for our young people. We will be generating advice sheets and sharing knowledge from training courses that we complete as well to build a set of documents to support this area.

Our circles have been really fun, using the ipad for facetiming parents, chatting to the group in the other room, programming work, looking at remotes and cameras and old phones, making a pretend tablet and choosing apps from a paper app store, talking about what the picture represent and what the app is for, taking photos and videos of each other, printing pics out with a tiny printer, using our Yoto and walkie talkies!

Our Sun table has had a “senses” focus using delicious fruit for taste, mystery smelling jars for smell, different textures and mystery boxes for touch, sounds games for hearing and all of the above for sight!

Next week we will continue the Pirate theme, have a chatter box full of interesting items for the sun table, lots of Maths inside and outside and puzzles and another mindful Thursday session!

We have had a wonderfully busy week, lots going on and so much learning and play and fun and inspiration!

The week started with a normal Monday, setting up for the week ahead – laying out our hat and bag and jewellery shop for free flow sessions, we started with some dinosaur fossil hunting in the garden and our brilliant circus skill games as well. Our welcome tray concentrated on feelings each morning and then playdoh and fossils during free flow.

We welcomed Kate from Tiny Travels on Tuesday and she led 3 sessions where the children we are able to learn about diversity and explore some beautiful treasures from around the world that Kate has collected and she has visited 120 countries! She sang songs with us, talked about how we are all different and valued and how to be kind and the children loved the parachute play at the end with the blow up globe flying up into the air. We loved her sessions and the children were engrossed and fascinated, the Stars had a little session at the end which allowed them to play with the treasures and smell the different sensory pots Kate had and to try on slippers and play instruments too. We will definitely be booking Kate for next year as well as part of our celebrations of diversity through our year.

Alfie came on Wednesday am to lead football sessions which were brilliant and the children all loved their stickers and stamps!

Thursday the Moon group had a brilliant Forest School session in the warm sunshine, learning how to saw and enjoying snack by the fire and then we welcomed 10 Grandparents in for the afternoon session who joined Robot Reg in his phonics lesson and we will be doing the same today – Friday!

Our circles times have had a dinosaur theme, carrying on from the exploring last week – dinosaur stories, a dino number games, matching dinos and their shadows, naming and sorting and drawing dinosaurs, dinosaur facts and dinosaur songs and dance and building dinosaur houses to match the height of the dinosaur! All brilliant fun, lots of learning – maths, size, names, new vocab, numbers, literacy, stories and mark making too. Next week our circle times will be based on colour and science!

The week has flown past and we have caught up with lots of families for parent consultation appointments and shared the paper version of our learning journey, handed out next steps and chatted over any worries you may have. We will also add the next steps to Tapestry for you and please do have a look at the Tiny Travels photos and videos from Tuesday. We also use facebook for some photos of activities as well and are using the whiteboard which will be propped up in the undercover area each day.