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.

Fossils, saltdough lollipops, flowers and photos, jars and hand made labels, making bones from sponges, finding dinosaurs, mud, more mud, mud kitchen, cleaning the mud kitchen, water, rain, more rain, puddles and bubbles, a zoo, a farm, a jungle, zoo leaflets from Tesco, a trip to Home Bargains, making homes for animals, painting, balloon painting, animal facts, watercolour painting, drawing on huge pieces of paper, singing, story time, more singing, music and finger action songs – just a snapshot of the activities and fun we have during free flow!

We really believe in a mixture of child led, adult led and free play and we plan lots of activities that are available to the children and in addition we have our teaching times during our circles too!

This week we have  – talked about “special ladies” at preschool, each child had a key person who supports them, chats to their family, creates their learning journey and shares info with the team about that child and how they are getting along and if there are any worries. The children adore the ladies at pre-school, they are a really kind and loving bunch of children and they really enjoyed talking about which ladies were special to them. We have had a literacy theme as well and the children have read and written stories, enjoyed story sacks and learnt animal facts to support the role play in our zoo and had a trip to Home Bargains to buy some flowers and look at the Mother’s Day displays. We have been rhyming, learning letter sounds, playing letter games and listened to stories in different languages – Polish, Latvian and Mandarin so far to support children in our setting who are bi or tri lingual.

Forest School sessions have now swapped over so Moons enjoy that session on a Thursday and Sun’s on a Friday now and the Star group will access Forest School for the first half of the summer term. The Forest School sessions continued despite the rain and there are some wonderful photos with lots of team work with the water play, making rivers and boats!

Our weeks are so busy and we try hard to share info but we have started to write a few of our activities each day on a whiteboard for you to spot when you come to collect your child – we know that they key people for each family can be spread around our setting at pick up but please do always go and find them or ask where they are for an update. We have parent consultations starting next week and we look forward to sharing progress with you and listening to any worries you may have too.