Just a little reminder that graduation will be on Saturday the 13th July! Please feel free to invite any family members or friends who would like to attend. Tickets will go on sale in the near future.
We have had a busy few weeks in pre-school with many of our older children beginning their transitions to their new schools. With this in mind we have transformed our messy room into a school consisting of a classroom, gym and dinner hall. The children have very much enjoyed roleplaying in these areas practising their numbers and letters and taking on the role of teacher or dinner lady. A few of our children are going to be big brothers or sisters soon so we have been role playing with the babies and have read some stories about babies in mummy’s tummy’s! This week is Health and Nutrition week and pre-school have been busy doing lots of activities for this: making smoothies, racing, practising hulahoops, counting the fruit and vegetables they are eating each day and drinking 6-8 glasses of water a day!
We are very happy to announce the safe arrival of all three of our baby chicks. We would like to take this opportunity to Welcome Black Rose, Banana and Elmo into our room. We have been focussing on planting and growing over the last few weeks and have moved our vegetables from the pre-school room out to our vegetable patch in the front garden. We really hope we get some yummy vegetables to make soup soon! We have been getting creative making a large (and quite complex!) kite to fly in the windy weather. We are currently learning about frogs and tadpoles and are trying to source some frogspawn. The children are interested in road safety and are making good use of the resources in the garden to build roads. Finally we have been carrying out some science experiments with Heather to develop our investigation skills and have had a great time making balloon kebabs, frezzing water instantly and bouncing eggs! The children have demonstrated fantastic problem solving skills throughout these activities. Well done pre-school!
Pre-school have been very busy planting flowers and vegetables over the past week. We are going to make a vegetable patch in the front garden and have had great fun preparing the vegetables so that they are ready to be planted outside. We went on a trip to dobbies recently to buy two new fish for our tank. The fish names have yet to be decided! We are currently learning about wild animals as the children have been taking on the role of tour guides on Safari. The children are building up their knowledge of what these animals eat and where they live to enable them to take on the role of tour guide. We have been busy turning our quiet room into a jungle making snakes and leaves to hang down from the ceiling. We would like to welcome Olivia and Leah into the pre-school room.
We would like to welcome Olly and Faye into the preschool room. We are very pleased at how well they have settled. Pre-school have been learning about castles and enjoyed visiting the library to get information books related to this topic. We have also made a castles word wall which the children are using to support their writing skills. The green group have been focusing on shape and colour at group time taking part in matching and sorting activities. The red group have been focusing on letter sounds and are making excellent progress with their jolly phonics. They have also begun to discuss weight and have been using informal units of measurement to weigh objects from around the room using scales. We went to the nursing home at the start of this week and sang some songs to the ladies and gentlemen there. We were a little shy but will be going back every month which will help lots in building up our confidence for school!
Pre-school have had great fun this week making a fantastic castle using cardboard boxes. The children have enjoyed learning about the past through this topic and decided to make a coat of arms to represent our room. We enjoyed making paper swords and practising our sword fighting skills when role playing in our castle. We have also demonstrated an interest in holidays and airports in our role play and have been booking holidays in the home corner. We recently purchased finger and hand puppets for ‘The Three the Little Pigs’, ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and the children have had great fun acting out these traditional stories. We would like to take this opportunity to welcome William, Evie, Maisie and Ava into the preschool room and hope they are having as much fun as we are! We are focusing on letter sounds particularly with our older pre-schoolers this week playing letter sound games on the genee board and learning jolly phonics at group time.
We have had a very sad few weeks in pre-school saying goodbye to our ‘big’ boys and girls and a happy few weeks welcoming the new new ante-preschoolers. We have been focusing on settling in new children teaching them our rules and routines. We have been learning about our bodies and the effects exercise has on our bodies. We have really enjoyed dancing along to the skeleton song to learn the names of different body parts.
In the Pre-school room we have been learning about animals focusing on sea animals. We had a ‘textures day’ putting our feet into wet sand, gluck and cold water. We made lava lamps using oil, coloured water and vitamin c tablets. It was loads of fun! We have also been interested in the Gruffalo so we made a Gruffalo story and acted out the story. Today we went to the park and now we are about to make paintings by squeezing paintballs!!
Pre-school really enjoyed the snow last week making snowballs and throwing them at their teachers!! They also made a small snowman using almost all the snow that was left in the garden! We celebrated the snow by having a second Christmas making presents for each other and playing Christmas songs and party games. We are also very excited about the impending arrival of our baby chicks and have enjoyed watching them develop inside their eggs drawing pictures of what we have seen through the ezscope. Finally we would like to welcome Lauren into pre-school we know she will enjoy her time at ABC!
We have been very lucky the last two weeks in pre-school and have been playing and learning with lots of new resources. We have purchased new microphone dictaphones to record ourselves for the nursery website and have bought metal detectors which we used to go on a pirate treasure hunt and found a half crown coin in the digging area. We have also been looking at agates and have learnt lots of interesting things about how they are made.
