Autumn Term Week 11

This week we had a Christmas send off for Andrea, she loves Christmas and is a superb help to me during the festive period, writing the play and organising the scenery and costumes and creating Christmas magic wherever she goes! We had a surprise Christmas party day for her and she was really touched, especially to see the children were also involved by wearing Christmas jumpers too!

Forest School sessions this week were brilliant, lots of sawing and hard work! Lighting the fire and playing with the gutters and cause and effect and the mini beast of the week was the centipede! The Sun group take part on a Thursday and the Moon group on a Friday and this swaps around each half term. The groups learnt that the centipede can have from 14 – 177 pairs of legs and each pair in one a single segment. They eat cockroaches and flies and worms and spiders and can regrow their legs! They never have exactly 100 legs! Some lovely comments too – one little girl knew that “they eat words”, one chap knew where to find them “there might be a centipede under that rock as it is dark” and a good question too “do centipedes eat leaves?” and one chap was inspired “I want to go and find a centipede in a dark place” and off he went!

Circle times have had a shape focus this week:-

Stars – have looked at shapes and played shape matching games, drawn shapes and drawn around shapes and matched brick shapes onto templates.

Sun and Moons – have learnt about 3 D shapes, drawn around shapes, played shape bingo, helped me sort out a big shape mess I created and enjoyed a shape hunt too.

We have also learnt about our Planet, made mini earth art and explored the concepts of recycling, growing, change and where our food comes from.

We have had a very wet week here at pre-school which is a shame, but we have lots of good activities planning inside for wet days and the children keep playing and learning and we get out into the garden as much as we can in wet weather gear! We have a new set of water wall equipment which we are hoping to put up next week in the dryer weather and will use balls and boats on that instead of water if it is colder.

We have been running obstacle courses and different physical activities designed to promote strength and co-ordination. Next week we will set up some role play outside too with a mini library and cafe and I would love you to take photos of your food! Please send in pictures from your phone of your plates with the food on and I will laminate them for the cafe – you breakfast lunch or tea, slices of cake or a fruit snack please!

We will also be encouraging the children to borrow books for real at the end of the day and our boards will have your child’s name on it and the book they have chosen, we will keep a list and then please do bring them back after a few days and we can lend out another one.

There will be a library style trail to follow as well (Christmas themed!) and lots of books to enjoy.

We also have some Christmassy games and things inside and will be exploring ice inside in the warm!

We have some hairdresser role play on offer too in the sun room in free flow so we are hoping for a lovely busy week!