Our Costa coffee shop has been open for another week and we have seen lots of wonderful role play there, supported by the ladies extending and helping the children learn and play with real imagination.

Our Costa has now been attached to an airport and we have been travelling across the UK and the world in the sun room during free flow – again brilliant role play and language and imagination and we have a plane, boarding passes, tickets to Longleat and Butlins, air plane windows, posters of places to visit, holiday brochures, suitcases and bags and a scanner!

We will be having a tidy up today and packing the coffee shop away ready to play with next year and to make sure the pre-school is tidy for our fete tomorrow! 11.30am – 2pm and the sun is going to shine we think!

Our circle time theme this week has been change and growth. There is a lot of change coming for the Sun and Moon children as they prepare to move up to primary school and for the Stars as they move to the Sun and Moon groups. The activities have been fantastic again this week, lots of brilliant work, chat, drawing and writing from the children.

The Star group have learnt about animals and their young, looked at their baby photos and their pictures that we took at the beginning of the year in Star and then learnt about which groups they are moving to in September, looked at their special books, talked about seasons and the stages of the year and of how we grow and have been amazed by how the beans we have planted have grown too!

The Sun and Moon children have learnt about differences between babies to children to adults, talked about what they can and can’t do yet and how to achieve new skills like riding a bike. The children have also used their baby photos and compared them to their circle photos taken last September and organised the photos into piles for which school they are going to which has really helped them to visualise who they will move with. They have tried on uniform and looked at the school photos that we have, learnt about animals and their young.

Forest School this week is for the Moon group on a Thursday and Sun on a Friday and the Thursday Moons had an idyllic tie out in the back garden with Sophie and Eva, the garden is looking beautiful for the Forest School and the Fete – thanks to Ray (married to Claire!)

Next week we will be looking at any last gaps to help the children with and we will be creating a wonderful jungle display for the graduation celebration along with learning about being independent, we have a football coach coming to give us two sessions and we have the new children coming in for their session visits. Have a lovely weekend and hope to see you all at our Summer Fete.

We have had a wonderful week full of building! Building bridges, Buckingham Palace, Great Wall of China, Forth Road Bridge and little footbridges too. The children have been learning about different countries and cultures and have really soaked up so much teaching and knowledge. The Sun and Moon groups have used the knowledge from one circle time and then talked about it and applied in for another – for example one little chap was able to tell Andrea that he needed water to go under a bridge because it was Venice and there are no roads and no cars and deliveries are all made by boats! He had learnt that in my circle time when we were looking at many different bridges from around the world.

We have been building outside as well – using our large construction pieces and our imaginations.

The STEM activities have been challenging the children as they come into preschool each morning, problem solving and talking over ideas. We have also had “fun tech” in the Moon room with a teacher – using the remote controlled cars and metal detectors!

Our circle times have all been based on a learning topic of “Countries” and we cover all areas of learning within those, creating exciting and engaging activities that support progress for all children.

The Sun and Moon group have had a brilliant week, creating the Great Wall of China – using the whole of the sun room! They have made flags and looked at the globe and the bug map we have, built bridges from around the world, talked about Australia and France, made African necklaces and danced to world music, explored the world instruments we have and watched and had a go at Russian dancing, Greek dancing, Flamenco dancing and Strictly Come Dancing!

The Star group have made passports, made flags from around the world, played with our world musical instruments and learnt all about animals from around the world and made aboriginal animal dot paintings.

We have subscribed to a new platform on line called Polylino. This is a brilliant new resource which translates books into many languages and provides excellent ideas for supporting children to develop English in addition to their home language. At Pre-School this year we have children who have the following languages spoken by family – Spanish, Turkish, Polish, Latvian, Malayalam, Sinhala, Portuguese, Italian, Mandarin, Urdu.

Polylino features books to suit all tastes and interests.  Alongside stories, it features non-fiction, rhyming poetic texts and nursery rhymes helping to support the teaching of English in the Early Years.  There are a range of different styles and genres including funny books, bedtime stories, books about first experiences helping to introduce children to new situations, books perfect for sharing, stories that help to promote empathy and much more. We can also create a log in for parents so that they can use the books in their home language and in English too.

It has been a really wonderful experience to read the same book in English and then to read it in Polish and see a child’s face come to life as their home language is represented and heard by friends and teachers. We have been lucky that we have been able to afford the platform through the fundraising amount raised at the brilliant Bingo evening held in the Spring so that you to our committee for working hard to give us money to spend on our new ideas! All centered around making the experience of being at our preschool the very best it can be for ALL of the children.

There are a lot of new projects in the pipeline for the Autumn Term and some good shopping wish lists as well which we are really grateful to the committee for raising much needed funds to buy new equipment. Our summer fete is coming soon and we hope this will give us the money we need for new literacy items and maths kit, Forest School equipment and a new STEM set of resources to support this important area of teaching.

We hope the children have enjoyed their week, we have been exercising our socks off! Lots of brilliant games and activities during circle times and play outside. We have been playing jumping beans, an exercise game where we roll the dice for different activities, yoga and we have made a big spider web, crawling and climbing over the string! Balancing, obstacle courses, co-ordination and using a straw to blow little plastics balls along a shute – lots of bending over and hard work chasing and collecting the balls.

Outside we have had a garage and bike repair centre, a car wash and we have had the bikes out all week with new registration plates on them to support looking at letters and numbers while washing and riding the bikes. there have been some muddy puddles to splash in and our mud kitchen is looking very inviting as well.

Inside we have been enjoying wedding role play, lots of beautiful photos and pretend weddings, banquets and food choices, flowers and even a real wedding dress!

We have had 3 mornings on Mini Forest School – Tues/Wed and Friday and the children absolutely love these sessions. The Stars continue with them until the half term and then the Sun and Moon children go back into the sessions.

Robot Reg has come to visit again this week and the Moon group loved their walk up to the Church, and loved exploring St.Andrews and chatting all the way there and back!

Our caterpillars are growing well and the Sun room is in the lead with 3 chrysalises formed already. Our sun table has been home to mini beast trays, butterfly craft, sorting the worms colour game and our mini beast Understanding the World box. Alongside that we have been developing our painting provision – moving the easel inside so that we can help the children more easily, support them to choose colours and paint their picture and then we can ensure it is named and kept safe ready to go home.

Next week we are CLOSED on Monday, and when we are all back on Tuesday we will be playing castles and knights in the garden, hairdressers inside (this group of children love role play!), learning how to use scissors and tools and lots of mark making too.

We are very close to completing our Walk the Moon challenge with 92% of the total walked! Well done all – a nice long bank holiday walk from you all should get us to our target – the challenge finishes at the end of the month for national Walk to School day!

Have a lovely long weekend.