Spring Term Week 1

Happy New Year to all our families! We hope that you had a happy Christmas and New Year period and the children have settled straight back into our routines and are happy and busy and playing beautifully!

The Spring term is a lovely time for us here at pre-school, we look forward and learn about growth and change, we look at the world around us and explore nature and touch on topics such as health and wellbeing, exercise, sleep, teeth and illness and we learn about how to be healthy too.

We will have a focus on literacy for January and Maths for February but of course both of these creep into all of our games and role play and circle times daily too.

We also run lots of nurture groups and this half term we have groups of 2 or 3 children at a time working on friendships, confidence, physical development, emotions and “wanderers” – these are children that need a little extra adult support when out and about in free flow – free flow is from 10.15 – 11.35 and this can be a busy time and some children find it hard to decide what to play with when there is so much on offer so a guiding hand and gentle help supports them to make choices and learn how to play with friends or how to play with a particular activity that they may have never seen before. Our groups change based on the individual children’s needs each half term.

Our circle times this week have been a lovely welcome back and chats about Christmas presents!

Stars have been mark making, drawing presents which helps them to learn that marks have meaning, they have also looked at their names along our literacy theme and used pretty counters to follow the line of the first letter of their name, helping them to recognise it. They have sorted fruit and veg using real items to bring that to life and learnt about body awareness, singing head shoulders knees and toes and listening to their heart rate after running!

Sun and Moon groups have also created some wonderful pictures of Christmas presents too! Their skills at representing objects in drawings are really developing well. The groups have learnt about their bones and skeletons, using a pretend x ray scanner on our ipad and then drawing their hand or skull on black paper, we have looked at dinosaur x-rays as well and also explored lunch boxes looking for fruit and we are learning about a different food group each week over this half term. At lunchtimes we will be making a tally chart together, looking at who has which fruit, then which dairy product etc over the half term and I will share these charts on the whiteboard in Reception so please point them out to the children when you are in the queue and take the chance to count and talk about the foods on the list.

As a charity money is very very tight for us this year with rising costs, we know all families are feeling the rise in the cost of living but if anyone could possibly make donations of the following we would be so grateful – bird feeders and bird food (NUT FREE please) and rice and flour and vinegar and bicarb and cereals and for the activities next week we would love lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, tinned sweetcorn, frozen fruit, mini tortilla, cheese, mango, pomegranite, kiwi, fig, lime, lemon, pineapple (fresh) and any other fascinating fruits you may see!

I attended a course on Invasive Groups Strep A this week with the South West Public Health unit so information will be coming out via email but as always please get in touch if you have any concerns.

Next week we will be making smoothies, fruit kebabs, mini healthy pizzas, learning about nature, focusing on letters and their sounds. Moon group are enjoying Forest School on a Thursday and the Sun group on a Friday this half term. and this week they have reminded each other of the rules and how to be safe and also learnt about ladybirds! They know that ladybirds can eat 5000 insects in their lifetime, they are actually beetles and play dead to avoid being eaten and usually have 7 spots!