Autumn Term Week 6

Our week has been full of wonderful Autumn sensory play, exploring the pumpkins and the conkers and Autumn leaves that have been donated. The children have worked really hard to chop up the pumpkins to make soup which we have for snack today and we used tomatoes and leeks from our own garden to add flavour as well. Carrying the heavy pumpkins around has been brilliant for building strength and this is one of our focuses over the coming weeks. We are building a new display based on being strong and will be trying lots of different kinds of exercise to improve our balance, co-ordination and arm and hand strength and we will be sharing lots of activities for you to do at home with your children to help them be strong for school.

Our fire station was a hit this week, fantastic role play and imaginative play and cat rescuing, and rolling away from fires and dialling 999 and making sirens for the fire engine! We have always wanted a pallet and chairs to be connected so that we can turn it into anything we want and this week Alison made Andrea’s dream come true! Finally we have a brilliant base for role play – it was so popular that we have to make another one to ensure everyone can have a turn! The children were fantastic at taking turns and coming up with ideas – we need sirens, we need flashing lights – we have loved playing with them!

One more week until half term and we will be continuing with our Autumn themes, we will also be building train tracks for the week with lots of different ways to make them interesting – we will be raising the track up, using dominoes for cause and effect work, we will make our own scenery, we will also be rolling out massive sheets of paper and drawing our own tracks too. Outside we will continue with the fire theme, making pretend fires and putting them out. We will be baking our own snack as usual and finishing our half term’s learning around shape, reading, being healthy, listening skills and exploring media before we move on after the half term to numbers and mark making, learning about our world, making friends and playing together, being imaginative and we will start to think about CHRISTMAS!!!
Forest School has been a great success again this week, sawing and using tools safely, making spiders, and making bread over the fire. Enjoying hot chocolate and stories and time in the back garden mud kitchen too!

 The circle times have been exceptional this week, we have two ladies who are working towards being group leaders and they are planning well and really thinking about how to move the children forward with their learning. Our experienced group leaders have planned a wide variety of circle times and the children have been absolutely engaged in their learning, really well developed listening skills mean that they are learning so quickly and making brilliant progress already! My favourite observation of the week – during a chat at lunchtime about jobs – “My Mummy helps people, she helps their eyelashes!” said one little chap!

Star room – have explored sensory trays and learnt new vocabulary to describe them, played lots of matching and listening games, talked about textures and learnt size language and made their own musical instruments too. They have enjoyed snack outside a couple of times which has been fun and we have been able to open up the pre-school to full free flow from 9am as our youngest children have settled so well they are ready to be out and about with the older ones.

Moon and Sun room – both school starter groups are working hard on their listening skills too, they are able to follow instructions and directions really well now and take part in many activities to learn about being healthy from talking about going to the dentist and learning about our teeth to practising yoga and knowing about how to be strong. They have played rhyming games to develop literacy skills and used music to tap out their names and learnt about may different kinds of instruments from around the world

To support our learning at preschool here are some ideas for you to do at home –

Look up children’s yoga moves online and send us some photos of your poses, encourage your child to put their coat on and their own shoes on, build arm strength by letting your child carry a heavy pumpkin or help you cut up the vegetables for tea, look for shapes around your home – TV is a rectangle, the plate is a circle etc, look at train videos online and talk about the colours, sounds, movement and shapes and scenery.

We all hope you have a lovely weekend and week ahead before we finish for the half term.