Space has dominated our week and the children are learning a huge amount and taking a really active role in the space station outside. We love teaching them about a topic as it helps us develop their communication and language skills, listening skills, creativity comes into the activities, looking at books, watching rockets take off on kids tube, space yoga so working on physical development too and some good old fashioned singing and stories within the theme!

We have also worked hard on our health and being fit this week with activities in the green room supporting that – dancing and moving, gymnastics sessions, hula hoop crawling (photos on the blog I am sure!) and an exercise CD designed for children this age. We have also changed out routine at lunchtimes too – instead of separating into two groups based on “going home” and “staying for lunch” we are now offering the children a choice of “quiet story” or “dancing” and it is really lovely to see the children who want to be active laughing and moving around – getting out all the wiggles before sitting for lunch and then really rewarding to read a story to the quieter gang who want a little rest before lunch after a busy morning! The children know what they want and we are finding the time is used more effectively for them all.

Green circle – made shape patterns and pictures, enjoyed lovely story times, learnt about animal patterns and learnt new songs too.

Red and blue circles – we have been learning about space, making our own planets, looking at robots and drones, we face timed each other and some parents and face timed Mandy in the office too! We learnt about dental hygiene, time, enjoyed story sacks and learning about star constellations

We will be working on taking care of toys and our environment next week so do have a chat about that at home if you can, we will be enjoying clay, technology toys, construction outside and more space role play. We would love to go for a walk to Tufty Park next Thursday and Friday if you can volunteer to help us – we like to have a 2:1 ratio when out and about so would need 6 parents probably to help the group. It is nice to go for a walk and explore, chatting away as we wander to the park.

Parent Consultation weeks start on Monday so we look forward to sharing how your child is getting on with you, and showing you our hard work that forms their special book and learning journey.

Two weeks to go until the February half term and we are also looking forward to a visit from Moo Music on the 13th and 14th Feb to finish off a busy first half of the Spring Term.

Happy New year to all our families! We are happy to welcome everyone back and very pleased that all the children are over the illnesses that they had at the end of term.

We have had a lovely first week back, lots of chatter about Christmas on Monday and it has hardly been mentioned since! We have started our term with a totally unplanned week as an experiment. We have taken out lots of different resources and allowed the children to choose what they want to do and to learn about and then we have helped them set up their play or just joined in to develop language and ideas. We have seen lots of lovely child led play which has helped us decide what to teach and set out for next week. One of the main positives is that we seem to have had much more time to be with the children rather than setting up lots of different activities so we have really had chance to listen to what they want and carry out some great observations on their preferences. Our nurture groups are also up and running well, supporting the children who find the environment quite big and busy and need support to settle and explore.

This week we have enjoyed lots of role play, vets and pirates and knights and castles. We have been really creative, enjoyed construction with lots of different kinds of resources, rediscovered trays and boxes of toys that we hardly ever use. Outside we have made a Paw Patrol den, built an obstacle course, had a teddy bears picnic, made jewellery, put bubbles in the rain water, played games and set up a fire station and used the guttering to  play with the cars and the balls.

Next week we are planning a lovely home corner in blue, child led activities in the red room with adults to teach and support and extend vocabulary and games and exercise outside. We would love donations of bubbles please to blow outside on windy days, herbs and spices for playdoh and we would also love a gym ball or two!!

We hope you enjoy the photos from the first week!

There was an air of excitement and nerves on Tuesday as we welcomed Ofsted into our pre-school to carry out their inspection. We are very proud of the work we do and took the opportunity to show the inspector and her trainee all we could and as it is a team effort I would like to take this chance to say a big public thank you to them all for all their support. We will be checking our email a lot, waiting for the report to arrive so that we can share it with you.

Apart from that we have enjoyed a normal week here, which generally means a week full of chatter, activities, fun, mess, sadly too much rain this week but lots of exercise indoors and finally some Christmas craft. As it is nearly December we can really get started on making you all a little Christmas gift from your child and we hope you are happy with the cards and mugs that you have ordered which also raise funds for the pre-school.

This week we have had soft play out in the green room during free flow which has been really popular, we have had theatre role play in the red room and we have seen some exceptional performances – Frozen being a big favourite but the Ofsted inspector was also treated to a wonderful Elvis impression by one of our boys! The blue room is used for small nurture group work during free flow which really benefits the children and outside (when possible!) we have been creating our under cover Christmas role play scene and enjoying the bikes and obstacle course for the bikes – some challenging slopes with a little bit of risk for the children to manage themselves.

This week the green group have been working hard on counting skills, expressing themselves through movement, sorting coloured items, drawing lines and circles and dancing to sticky kids.

The red and blue groups have enjoyed looking at photos of our town, chatted about where we live and making postcards which will be posted to you! They have worked hard on number recognition through lots of different games and activities. They have also used colours for a purpose creating autumn pictures.

Next week we are having a maths week on the red table as lots of the children have maths skills for next steps at the moment and we will also be creating a Polar Express train outside with a lovely North Pole station too. The green room will be a base for trying on costumes for the Nativity Play and for making any news items we need and for making our paper lanterns for the Lantern Parade on Saturday evening. Please come along and join the committee and parents and children who will be walking through our town.

We would love donations of balloons, red paper cups, salt, cornflour and red and green food colouring.