Spring Term Week 4
Our family home life role play has been great fun this week, we have added in pretend baking, babies, a cafe, a home office, lots of turn taking and chatter and wonderful language and kindness and imaginative play. We will carry this on for the next week as well and would love any donations of old home equipment like kettles or a microwave or old hair straighteners or drills or radio’s – anything that doesn’t work any more! We cut the plugs off to make everything extra safe and the children love to use real items, we use real plates and cups to encourage them to look after the objects and the extra weight of using real plates etc improves their strength too. There are some lovely photos on the gallery this week so please have a look, there is a limit on how many I can add so I am sorry if I miss anyone out – let me know if you haven’t spotted your child for a while!
We finished last week with a wonderful celebration for Chinese New Year and this week has ended with a fantastic set of stage shows!
Our theme outside has been construction and we have built many different buildings and chosen patio slabs, laminate worktops, new tools from catalogues and drawn our own ideas.
The Star group have built homes for animals and people, they have started to listen out for sounds in words and enjoyed lots of wonderful story times using the story sacks which are full of props and bring the story to life, really engaging the children.
The Sun and Moon groups have worked along the construction theme in circle time as well – re-creating buildings from photos (Big Ben, The Shard and the National Gallery were favourites!) and this took some really good skills – looking carefully at the photo, talking about the shapes that we needed, working together on an idea and feeling a sense of pride in our creations. We have also constructed a stage and letters and homes for animals over the week.
We had two trips to St Andrew’s School this week as well, on Thursday the Sun group went in the afternoon and on Friday the Moon group headed off to explore. It is lovely to go back and see old friends who are all doing so well at school and to catch up with the Foundation teacher. We played in the Foundation unit, had a story in the library with Miss Rice and played on the climbing frame – another HUGE thank you to the parents that helped us walk there, the children did brilliantly as it is quite a long way.
We have reviewed all the children’s progress and have identified areas for every child to work on and will be sharing home learning ideas with you over the next two weeks and your key person will hand you an idea to support your child at home. We have lots of areas still to teach and work on and all of the reviews help us decide what to plan and we can add in all sorts of learning opportunities into every area of the pre-school!
Next week we continue with construction – building a farm and a mud kitchen outside! We will carry on with home corner role play to support imagination and friendships and turn taking. We continue with Dinosaur craft to encourage the children to the craft area and we will be starting a craft club after half term to encourage those reluctant mark makers and creators!