Another exciting week at pre-school as we head towards the end of term, visits from primary school teachers and the lovely Marie from Animals 2 U came on Thursday and Friday mornings for the Sun and Moon groups. She brought some wonderful animals with her and the children were amazing and listened really carefully to her facts about each animal and to her instructions on how to be gentle and touch the animals. We were really proud of our group who all sat beautifully for the sessions. We had chinchillas, a tree frog and bearded dragon, a snake, black tailed gerbils and a giant snail.

We have packed a lot of learning into the last week, our focus been on creating a lovely display ready for our celebrations next week and we have chosen a jungle theme to work alongside our visits from Marie so we have been creating some beautiful artwork in free flow and in our circle times and have had our vet surgery out as well for role play.

Our circles times have been great fun this week as we prepare the children for their transitions.

Star circle have been learning about expressing feelings through drawing and movement and drawing and singing and about sequencing and following instructions and enjoying a fun obstacle course, cheering on friends and understanding that it is hard to lose sometimes and still be pleased for the friends that won.

Sun and Moon circle times have played emotion bingo, feelings charades, looked at lots of our emotions resources too. We have practised our pen grip and worked hard to write names.

We have had the bikes out a lot this week, transporting things around and taking turns with lots of water play.

Next week is another busy week with a Teddy Bears Picnic for the Sun and Moon group and the Stars will have one here so please bring a teddy in, more school visits for parent to take children to and our graduation celebration from 2.30pm on Thursday and Friday.

We will be emptying the baskets next week of all the bits and pieces that are in there for you to take home and a reminder that our last day is Monday 15th July.

The week has flown past and we have had a really lovely time! Thank you goes to Costa Cullompton who via social media donated a brilliant set of resources for our role play – thank you very much. The photos of the mini barista’s here are very sweet and the role play area has grown using lots of the children’s ideas.

We have continued with our brilliant Fairy Tale theme and we have loads of amazing creations across pre-school. There is a full scale growing operation in action, lots of magic beans being planted, pretend beanstalks have been made, lots of play and acting out the fairy tales we have been reading and pink noses and pig craft! The children have been really imaginative and excited by repeating the stories and have really learnt them well and can re-tell them perfectly with lots of enthusiasm.

Circle times :-

Star – have read Jack and the Beanstalk again and the 3 Little Pigs. They have counted out magic beans, practiced their understanding of prepositions by placing magic beans, read Goldilocks and looks at the sizes of the bears and counted bricks to match the height. They acted out the story and learnt a new song, sequenced the story and made little pig faces, planted beans and build bridges for the Billy Goats Gruff! What a week full of learning!

Sun and Moon – Lots of similar activities as above but with added maths and literacy and more complicated work to stretch them and to ensure progress. These two groups have also planted magic beans – in pots and in zip lock bags on the window! Designed castles, sorted items from different fairy tales, build houses for the little pigs and bridges to help the gingerbread man escape! They have ordered beanstalks in size order and drawn Jack, used a hair dryer to blow lots of different materials across the room to see what would be the strongest for a house. Painting and craft and sings and more stories all add up to a very busy week and it has been a really connecting theme across pre-school.

Outside we have also been singing along and using instruments outside and dancing away.

On the sun table we have been baking and cooking (all vegan recipes which are suitable for all the allergies here too) and making smoothies.

The Forest School sessions have been fantastic with Sophie and they children explored the wind on Thursday and Friday.

Next week we will start to talk about school and moving groups – we will be looking at uniforms and photos of the teachers. We know some of the children have had home visits this week and there are stay and play sessions at Willowbank and we are taking a group to St. Andrew’s too. We will be sharing the transition documents with you over the coming week and then finishing the special learning journey for you to keep when your child leaves us.

We hope you all have a lovely weekend

Our annual Hungry Caterpillar Picnic Party happened this week and it is such a wonderful experience for us all – we all get together in the back garden – all the Sun and Moon and Star children come together in one group to enjoy the releasing of our butterflies! We look after our tiny caterpillars for about 3 weeks in total and then after a couple of days outside of the cocoons they are ready to fly away. We take time to read the story in the Forest School garden, surrounded by nature and we buy all of the foods in the story to look at while reading and then to enjoy as a picnic. Then we sing our caterpillar song (we will perform this at the summer fete on the 22nd June!) and then release the butterflies. We had two picnics this year – Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning and the photos are all on the blog this week.

We have been really busy with other learning experiences as well this week – we have had a literacy theme and to keep our groups engaged and excited we have been learning about countries and cultures in circle time.

Sun and Moon – Using our mark making skills to label maps, learn the names of countries and continents, making passports and talking about where we live and where we have travelled to. Drawing our holidays and experiences and writing the names of continents and countries and adding in letter sounds and letter recognition to help us begin to learn the basics of reading by learning what letters look like.

Stars – have looked at differences in our world – different countries (hot and cold), differences in people and how we look, different animals in the different habitats and countries and have made the different flags from countries around the world.

We have had a focus on shape work this week with the sun table being home to many different shape games. Sorting shapes, making pictures from the shapes, making shape monsters to help sort the shapes and creating shapes from lollipop sticks too. We will continue some more work on this topic next week as well.

In other areas we have had the baby role play out as a child led activity, we have been working on big construction in the garden to add to our castle and this will also carry on next week as the children have really enjoyed working on their own creations and a group inside discovered that we have metal in our walls and were able to build a high tower using the magnetic shapes! Engineers in the making and with this in mind we are going to have a set of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) challenges next week!

Next week is our last week before the half term break and then we will be back for 6 weeks before finishing for the summer.