World Book day is such a lovely celebration of the world of books, we read all the time here at pre-school and reading to your child at bedtime every night is a really good way of supporting their learning, nice quite time together snuggled up and talking about the book as well as reading the story really helps children to settle down for a nice sleep. There is a brilliant website called Tiny, Happy People from the BBC with loads of advice on all sorts of topics and worries and activities.

Baby and toddler bedtime routine: Top tips for parents – BBC Tiny Happy People

World Book Day – BBC

The Moon group had a trip to the library on Thursday afternoon and loved reading books there before coming back to pre-school to play. We have had our story sacks out each morning and the children have been acting out the Billy Goats Gruff story on our own wobbly bridge!

Circle times have had a focus for learning about jobs, people who keep us safe and people who help us and we have welcomed Pauline in for a visit who is the lollipop lady from St Andrews. She is very good to us and pops down with her lollipop stick and hats and coats for the children to dress up in and stays for a while for a play in the garden, directing the children on the bikes and talking about road safety. We are also hoping to welcome a parent in the Royal Navy to talk about his work and the ship he works on, the local community police, Lisa from Tesco and a fire fighter. If anyone reading this has any contacts or would like to come in and share their work we would love to hear from you – any kind of work is interesting to us, not just the high profile high vis 999 professions.

We have been looking at the vehicles people need for their work, talking about jobs and work our families do, using posters and mini figures, toys and videos as well.

The Star children have used lots of different hats to learn about jobs, looked at emergency vehicles, watched a video of lots of different vehicles at work and matched equipment to jobs as well.

We have enjoyed vet role play inside, had lots of different transport toys out and outside we have been playing shops, using the role play to talk about size and pattern and money and counting and turn taking. Our fossil area has been popular too and we will leave this out for the children to now explore on their own having modelled the play and drawn maps, hunted for frozen dino eggs, used hammers, made fossils and bones, we are now leaving that as a child led area with all the equipment they need to enjoy the play with their new vocabulary.

Forest School has been a delight again this week as always, really wonderful sessions in the back garden with Sophie and Jackie.

What an exciting week! BBC Spotlight came to film and interview us this week as part of a news feature about underfunding in Early Years – we really hope that you all enjoyed the moments that were captured by the cameraman and we all thought pre-school looked bright and fun and full of happy faces. A moment of stardom for us and I had lots of children saying “I saw you on my TV!” It was a really fun moment and I was really glad that I said “Yes” when we got the call. The children have absolutely loved our wonderful Lunar New Year celebrations this week. The whole pre-school has been full of beautiful colour and craft and food and we have two families that celebrate Chinese New Year with their wider family and it has been really lovely to hear how they celebrate and to try some of the delicious food from the Golden Lion which was donated to us for lunch on Friday! It was a really special moment to see the children eating their noodles and spring rolls and talking about the food and the celebration. We felt very luck indeed to have the Golden Lion share their food with us today – thank you very much indeed.

Our free flow activities have been busy this week too – lots of role play with looking after the babies, there are two new babies in families at pre-school – Congratulations so some role play has been a nice way to help talk about a new sister. Outside we have decorated our Chinese Restaurant and had pretend takeaways and banquets and lots of playground games – egg and spoon races, skittles, parachute games and shape hunts.

Forest School have made valentines hearts using little pebbles and filled their tummies with porridge cooked on the fire.

All circle times have been using our Chinese New Year theme to teach lots of skills and give opportunities for craft and creativity, language and vocabulary, maths and patterns and letters and words, different ways of writing and food that they may not have tried before too. We have been watching dragon dancing displays, made lanterns, firework painting, learning about the different animals through the calendar and made dumplings with playdoh!

After half term we are going to set up an explorer’s area with fossil hunting and binoculars and bird spotting amongst other ideas. If you go out and about over half term and there are particular things that interest your child on a day out please let us know!

We hope you have a wonderful half term break and see you all from the 19th February onwards

We have had a wonderful week full of activities and fun

Exercise – balloon catching, football, making coloured bubbles in puddles, sporty mini sessions, bean bag games, rocket ballons and stampy rockets flying high into the sky. In circle times we have also been working on movement with dough gym to build strength in our hands and arms, and playing games where the children use straws, lie on the floor and blow feathers to make them move, crawling along to follow the feather – all fantastic exercise for our bodies!

Maths – number work on Andrea’s giant phone (see facebook for the photo!), lots of pattern work in circle times – animal pattern matching, repeating pattern work making bracelets and brick patterns, using our bodies to make patterns and copying them,  shape resources out on the tables every morning to familiarise ourselves with the names and characteristics of the shapes – we went on a shape hunt in reception and along our path finding lots of shapes in our environment.

We have following the children’s lead – exploring ice outside, spending time in our growing garden and our sensory garden where we spotted a caterpillar.

Our garden centre has been busy with children enjoying the shop style role play, buying and selling the pots and flowers are gardening gloves and we will be building on this next week with planting more bulbs together and tidying up the growing garden.

We had role play inside as well, our real home corner with real plates and cups and mugs which helps to build arm strength. The children have loved using the laminated photos of meals and this has been a great conversation starter for us, helping us continue to chat about healthy foods and treats. We have completed our fruit tally for the week – which is up on the board outside reception and next week we will be counting dairy items in our lunches.

We would love donations of compost and bulbs, string, shaving foam (not gel) and watering cans please to support our planning.

Next week we will be continuing with our maths work, one of the lovely parts of our job is to develop a love for Maths and to make sure that children have no negative feelings about any area of learning. Our teaching is hidden in all sorts of games and activities, all designed to inspire the children and promote progress. A course that I did recently highlighted that Maths is essential, we use Maths all the time in our lives and children learn the concepts in so many ways – learning about patterns and shapes, how to recognise faces and buildings using those shapes and patterns, understanding size – shoe size, size of a spoon – small for yoghurt, bigger for serving food for example, sizes of pieces of fruit – blueberries are smaller that oranges and shape – oranges are spheres and so are footballs.

Next week we are going to be learning about animals – making factsheets and drawing pictures and using non fiction books, we will also be keeping warm outside with obstacle courses and riding the bikes. More gardening and exploring technology inside as well.