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.

We have continued with our pirate theme this week following on from the wonderful role play and games last week, it has been a really engaging theme and I wish I had taken a photo of every single one of the brilliant games, puzzles, activities, craft and circle times that have all been along the pirate theme!

The group leaders are brilliant and have really created a wonderful week of learning for the children.

The Star group have been using pirate treasure to count, counting gold coins into treasure chests and finding coins in a sandpit with numbers on them. The Star group have also enjoyed mini forest school on Thursday and Friday mornings with Sophie. We are going to add in two Tuesday am sessions and one Wednesday session so that most of the Star group will have enjoyed that experience.

The Moon and Sun group have played pirate pattern games, matching coins in a pattern, bingo, counting gold nuggets and coins and writing and tallying numbers too. Pirate yoga, counting and matching numbers and a pirate pairs game. Robot Reg came to visit on Thursday and Friday afternoons.

Our caterpillars have arrived and each room has a set of 5 which will grow and then form their crysalis and then a beautiful butterfly will emerge from each! Hopefully in about 3 weeks time and we will set them free in our garden during a special picnic afternoon for the children.

Next week we are having a focus on physical development and weddings! We will be working on our strength, we will have all the bikes and tractors out as well with all of the kit needing a good wash and tidy up, with new numbers to add and a garage and workshop too.

Your key person will be sharing next steps over the coming week and the children who are starting school will have a Strong for School leaflet from us as their next step. We have a key person meeting on Monday and we will be discussing all of the children’s progress and nurture groups for this half term will be organised, you will get a little slip of paper about the group if your child is in one. Any further questions please do ask.

We have spaces for September 2024 for 2 and 3 and 4 year olds, we are busy on a Thursday and Friday so please let friends and family know that now is the best time to register for a space – they will be welcomed to our new parents evening on the 14th May, have a home visit and session visit all in time for the end of this term.

We are so lucky to have such a fun group of children this year, they just love to have a go at whatever we plan and organise and make the very most of it all – learning and playing at the same time which is just how it should be. There are some lovely photos of them this week – concentrating, laughing, engrossed in their play, exploring different textures and learning new skills in our circus activities and in our shape work over the week.

We have had a focus on 2D and 3D shapes, learning new vocabulary and how to use shapes and shape is such an important part of maths that we use going forward in our lives.

Circle times – the Sun and Moon groups have enjoyed lots of shape work, making shapes, sorting them and other games. We have also been learning about journeys and talking and planning and using photos of Cullompton to talk about how we get to pre-school and where we walk and what we see around us. The Moons had a lovely walk up to the town to take photos of the shops that are familiar to us.

The Star group did some shape tracing, painted with shapes, made pictures with shapes and matched shapes! They also talked about journeys and drew maps.

We are looking forward to our two Easter craft mornings next week and Lisa from Tesco is coming on Monday for an Easter Egg hunt as well. There will be lots of fun and craft and colour around next week as we head towards the Easter holidays.