Happy New Year to all our families! We hope that you had a happy Christmas and New Year period and the children have settled straight back into our routines and are happy and busy and playing beautifully!

The Spring term is a lovely time for us here at pre-school, we look forward and learn about growth and change, we look at the world around us and explore nature and touch on topics such as health and wellbeing, exercise, sleep, teeth and illness and we learn about how to be healthy too.

We will have a focus on Maths – shapes and numbers and patterns for January and lots of physical development and exercise and activity in free flow play and circle times daily too.

We also run lots of nurture groups and this half term we have groups of 2 or 3 children at a time working on friendships, confidence, physical development, emotions and “wanderers” – these are children that need a little extra adult support when out and about in free flow – free flow is from 10.15 – 11.35 and this can be a busy time and some children find it hard to decide what to play with when there is so much on offer so a guiding hand and gentle help supports them to make choices and learn how to play with friends or how to play with a particular activity that they may have never seen before. Our groups change based on the individual children’s needs each half term.

Our circle times this week have been a lovely welcome back and chats about Christmas presents!

Stars have been mark making, drawing presents which helps them to learn that marks have meaning, they have also looked at their names along our literacy theme and used pretty counters to follow the line of the first letter of their name, helping them to recognise it. They have sorted fruit and veg using real items to bring that to life and learnt about body awareness, singing head shoulders knees and toes and listening to their heart rate after running! We have had the soft play out in the star room during the rainy sessions and this has been brilliant, the children waited so well for their turns and did a great job of taking their shoes off and on.

Sun and Moon groups have also created some wonderful pictures of Christmas presents too! Their skills at representing objects in drawings are really developing well. The groups have enjoyed talking about Christmas, and about being healthy and talking about exercise. We have also explored lunch boxes looking for fruit and we are learning about a different food group each week over this half term. At lunchtimes we will be making a tally chart together, looking at who has which fruit, then which dairy product etc over the half term and I will share these charts on the whiteboard in Reception so please point them out to the children when you are in the queue and take the chance to count and talk about the foods on the list.

As a charity money is very very tight for us this year with rising costs, we know all families are feeling the rise in the cost of living but if anyone could possibly make donations of the following we would be so grateful – bird feeders and bird food (NUT FREE please) and rice and pasta and vinegar and cereals and for the activities next week we would love compost, bulbs, food colouring, flour and bicarb please.

Sun group are enjoying Forest School on a Thursday and the Moon group on a Friday this half term and this week they have reminded each other of the rules and how to be safe and the children have been acting out the Bear Hunt story.

We have wrapped up warm this week while playing outside in our wonderful sleigh and gingerbread house! We did hope for some snow flurries on Thursday but sadly nothing appeared from the cloudy sky!

Forest School sessions began inside for a while for the craft activity (amazing little owls!) and then moved outside to enjoy the fire and snack time and the garden.

Robot Reg has been to visit for his last session this term – he is such a huge hit with the children and he will be back in the summer term for a new set of sessions, we will hope to be able to afford 6 sessions in the summer so let’s fundraise as much as we can over the year!

Preparations are underway for our performance on the 12th December and all families should have the final information – you are welcome to bring grandparents along with you to the Church and we look forward to welcoming you all.

We have been decorating the trees in each room with the children and very kindly we have received a big donation of decorations with a wonderful light up little town and lots of individual donations from parents too – a big thank you!

We hope that you have all enjoyed your parent consultations and looking at the learning journeys, they will fill up over the year ahead and become treasured memories we hope for you and your family. We feel we know the children really well after this first term and have great ideas of where to go next with their learning, with your information from home and next steps handed out we have lots of new plans for January already!

The learning focus has been maths this week and lots of the circle times have given us some great observations. The children are making good progress in this area and we will revisit this in January.

Star group – working hard on patterns and matching patterns, counting dots and singing number songs, they have made some lovely Christmas trees counting out the pom poms and enjoyed singing number songs and using shapes to make Christmas trees too.

The Sun and Moon group have been learning about recognising numbers, matching numerals to quantity and counting out the right number of items for each numeral. We have learnt about 2D and 3D shapes and made tally charts, matched and organised and counted Christmas decorations and played a Christmas sound matching game.

Our free flow Christmas post office has been full on children mark making and talking all week and we have been persevering to complete Christmas puzzles and now it is the 1st December the Christmas tunes have started!

Next week we are going to be setting up lots of Christmas craft for the children to make to bring home and Christmas stories in our cosy gingerbread house and wrapping station. The sun room will have Christmas cooking activities and gingerbread playdoh too.

Our week has been full of space and planets and our solar system and the children have soaked up so much knowledge and have been fascinated by the theme. It is wonderful to see them all totally engaged in so many different ways by our teachers here. More detail on the circle times further along in my blog but a favourite moment from the week “I will be an astronaut when I am bigger but I will stay inside my rocket, I won’t do a space walk like Tim Peake, I don’t want aliens to get me!” – wonderful language and a lovely thought process, it made me smile a lot that our teaching and learning has inspired this.

We will be tidying up the rocket and the space station today and may revisit that again later in the year as it was a really popular topic and so easy to add in new vocabulary, physical development, counting, colour, stories and create awe for the world and what is around us.

Forest School has started again and this half term the Moons are out in our forest school on a Thursday and the Sun group on a Friday. They have been lighting the fire, enjoying hot chocolate and using the tools this week – the photos are wonderful.

We have also welcomed back our friend Robot Reg! He visits every Thursday and Friday afternoon to see the Sun and Moon groups and helps us to teach letter sounds to the children, he comes with his helper Rebecca and makes the children dance and laugh and learn. He is very popular indeed!

Our circle times have been focused on space with lots of added extra learning –

Star group – have chatted about the moon and stars and practised their pen grip, they have made moons and rockets – helps to learn about shape and creativity, they have learnt about where different animals live on our planet, enjoyed space rocket dancing and watched Tim Peake launch into space and then loved stamping on our rocket launcher to send their own rockets into space.

Sun and Moon – started the week learning Andrea’s planet and solar system song, they have created planets using chalk looking carefully at colour and learning facts about each planet and choosing their favourite. The groups have also made rockets using shapes, made craters using flour and big pebbles, and chosen a planet each and moved around the sun to replicate the solar system’s movement. Lots of facts and communication and sharing of ideas. We finished the week making a poppy wreath to thank those who keep us safe and to remember Mandy’s husband Bill who sadly passed away recently – he was in the RAF and we will be laying the wreath we made at the Memorial in Cullompton on Sunday if anyone would like to support that.

Next week we have a shift to a new set of planning and our theme for the week will be literacy, we will be reading, enjoying story sacks, choosing books, creating a cosy book area outside in our hut and encouraging all children to take time to sit and listen to a lovely story.

We have started Disco Thursday! It was a great success last year and we would love to hear what favourite songs get your child moving! Follow us on facebook and comment on the post to let us know what to add to our playlist.

In line with this and to build confidence ahead of our Christmas performance we will have a theatre week – lots of dressing up and dancing and moving and singing.

Next Friday is Children in Need – we will be dressing up in SPOTS – if you have something spotty please send your child in wearing it over the whole week and please if you can, make a donation into our box in reception. We will be spotty on FRIDAY.