Summer Term Week 1
Welcome to the summer term at Pre-School! We hope everyone had a lovely Easter break and we were really excited to see you all again after the holidays!
We have lots to look forward to this term, our annual Hungry Caterpillar picnic party in our back garden, our summer fete, trips to the church and the milk shed, a teddy bears picnic at the CCA fields and lots of fun and learning during normal sessions too! Lots of skills to practice before moving to primary school and the Star groups will enjoy mini Forest School, learning the rules and developing their independence ahead of their sessions as Suns and Moons next year.
This has been such a fun week, full of laughter and learning – the photos are lovely – I am sure the sunshine helps!
Our team have come back refreshed and thrown themselves into our pirate theme, using treasure maps outside, generating real excitement in their searches for treasure, we have made our own coins and treasure chests, built a pirate ship with a plank to walk on and a secret cove under a sail to explore. We have also had the water out in the sunshine with our solar fountains which are so pretty and mesmerise the children
Our other theme has been “questions” – talking about “What – Why – How” – lots of learning about technology.
The group leaders have been very inventive and we have had some brilliant circle times this week – we have also been talking about how to be safe online – to always use kids tube and not you tube, not to use a table or phone unsupervised and not to take technology to bed – a story read from a book is better than watching an ipad in bed. There are some scary statistics about young children accessing inappropriate content online when using a table or smart phone so please be careful.
Star – learning about technology – using our toy mobile phones, looking at the ipad and finding funny photos and videos, using our toy metal detectors and searching for metal treasure, remote controlled car races, printing photos from a phone on a tiny printer and using a laptop to send me an email and then I sent a reply! Then the stars made their own play laptops – fantastic vocabulary and language and concentration and turn taking with the fun tech toys!
Sun and Moon – this groups have used the ipad to facetime Mandy in the office and one of the parents in each of the group, they used Michelle’s tiny printer and took photos of themselves and then watched them be printed immediately, the groups used our programmable robots – Beebot and the pretend mobile phones. They learnt about different clocks, analogue and digital and talked about time and made their own watches and also emailed me from Andrea’s circle time and I replied!
Robot Reg came to visit on Thursday and Friday afternoons and the children were so happy to see Rebecca and Robot Reg! Bringing learning phonic sounds to a new fun level!
Our caterpillars have arrived and we will be taking care of them over the coming weeks.
We will also be learning about our senses on the Sun table next week and would love donations of balloons, jam jars with lids, plastic cups and foil, exotic fruits and scented candles please.
We are so grateful for all the fundraising you have been doing! The Bingo total was fantastic and the sponsored bike ride is looking like the very best year ever – total due soon! Thank you – it really means a lot to us and means we can buy equipment and toys and resources this term which will really benefit all of the children.