Spring Term Week 1

Welcome back to all our families – we hope you all had a happy and healthy and safe Christmas and New Year!

We have settled straight back into pre-school life with lots of lovely activities and chat this week, lots of stories about Christmas presents and we have used our circle time to remember our routines and rules and to learn about emotions too.

The hospital and baby weigh in clinic has been very busy inside, lots of future doctors, nurses and carers have been playing beautifully together, some brilliant ideas for how to take care of people who are ill and the staff have been brilliant at extending the play with new vocabulary and stretching the children’s imaginations. Luckily we have a lot of stethoscopes as they were the most popular prop!

To support this we also used our Understanding the world boxes for learning opportunities – using the dentist box, doctor sets, food and health and body books and our jobs box too. Lots of photos, books, stories and non fiction posters bring each area to life. We have high aspirations for the resources that we use here and work hard to come up with new ideas for our boxes so that they are fascinating and engaging. I am working on putting together a list of items that we would like to add and will send this out over this half term – often charity shops are a great place to pick up interesting items and Tesco is fantastic for sourcing non fiction books for the boxes!

Maths is a focus for this half term as well, starting with shapes and pattern work. Lots of exploring, putting shapes together to make pictures and searching for shapes in the word around us too.

Circle times have been all about how we feel, it has been really sweet to listen to the children talk about feelings and come out of circle time saying ” we have been talking about our emotions”.

Sun and Moon – these groups have talked about lots of feelings and explored what they look like, physical feelings when we feel sad or happy or cross, how our families affect our feelings and how we feel at pre-school too. We have covered friendships, how our faces look when we feel a certain emotion and what makes us happy or sad or cross or angry or scared or worried. Some brilliant observations from both groups – including the following comments “My mum makes me happy because she does so much for me” – ” My Mum makes me happy because she sings really good songs” – “sharing toys makes me happy” – “my Mummy makes me happy because she cooks lots of dinner for me”! They groups had a brilliant time drawing each other – a circle that is hard to explain but you will see the pics on Tapestry – using pens to draw on a plastic page, recreating a shocked or smiley face!

Star group – practised their circle time skills, listening and joining the circle, read stories about emotions and feeling happy or sad, the book – Rainbow Fish is about sharing too and the group made happy and sad faces using buttons and pasta and created some really detailed transient art, some lovely photos on the blog this week from the Stars.

Outside has given us a lot of inspiration with the ice and we spent the week playing with the children and following their lead to give us ideas for our planning – ideas include buses and transport, vets and animals, ice and learning about weather, looking at clouds for shapes.

Next week we will be spending time in circles learning about shapes, learning about the weather on the Sun table and about concepts such as floating and sinking, weight, gravity and enjoying some science experiments too! Outside we will be taking part in lots of movement and exercise to keep warm and developing our role play house into a costa coffee shop.