Preschool News 23.04.21

Well Preschool what a busy start to our new term we have had.

We have welcomed many new families, we have been introduced to our new topic 'Growing' focusing on the story 'Jack and the Beanstalk, we participated in litter picking for Earth Day and yesterday we marked St George's day by dressing as knights, dragons, princesses or wearing red and white and of course having lots of fun in the sunshine.

In our personal, social and emotional development, we have been settling back into our rhythms and routines and ensuring our new friends feel happy and feel a part of our Preschool family. It has been lovely to observe lots of lovely interactions between the children during free play, I am very proud of all our children. We also begun our new HeartSmart unit, this term we will focus on learning how important it is to tell the truth. This week we played a game, I described different features about Boris and the children had to say whether I was telling the truth or telling a lie. We then discussed that we should always make sure that what we say is true and kind. I explained that if something is true but to say it would be unkind, we don't need to say it, for example, if we notice someone has a big nose we don't need to tell them because it could hurt their feelings. Boris reminds us that, "What we say should always be true and kind"

To support our communication and language development, we listened to the story Jack and the Beanstalk and answered questions about the story. We also talked about words in the story, discussed what they meant and thought of different words to describe things, for example, we focused on different words to describe 'big' – gigantic, enormous, ginormous, huge, tall, massive etc. We have also been introduced to language to help us to grow a seed, such as, plant pot, seed, bean seed, soil, compost, trowel, spade, sow, water, watering can, sunshine, pour, fill.

To enhance our physical development, we have been developing our confidence in climbing. With support and independently we have climbed trees, tyres, and equipment on the adventure playground. It is wonderful to see children taking risks and seeing the pride in their faces as they overcome challenges. We have also continued with our dough disco and squiggle while you wiggle sessions.

We learnt to speak a a set of instructions to tell us 'How to plant a seed' as part of our literacy sessions this week. We learned that instructions tell us how to do something. After learning our instructions we were tasked with planting seeds and I was amazed at how we remembered the sequence of our instructions – great job Preschool. Our older children have also begun to develop their letter formation skills and this week we have focused on forming 'm' in our new books.
Don't forget that you can view what we have been doing in our phonics sessions on Tapestry each week. These sessions support children's early reading development by developing their listening and attention skills.

For our mathematics sessions, we were introduced to the four sided shapes, square and rectangle. We discussed similarities and difference between the two shapes and then sorted shapes into groups. Your home link this week is to go on a four sided shape hunt – happy shape hunting!

Planting seeds has been the focus of our understanding of the world development this week. Following our literacy sessions, we followed instructions to plant cress seeds, sunflower seeds, and bean seeds. We have also discussed what seeds need to grow. We are looking forward to observing changes to our seeds very soon. We have also been litter picking for Earth Day and we marked St George's day yesterday. We listened to the story of George and the Dragon and then re enacted the story in our free play.

In our expressive arts and design development, we have painted a massive, huge, enormous piece of corrugated card green to form our beanstalk. It was lots of fun painting on a big scale even though it was a bit tricky to work out how to paint the middle of the card, but as always Preschool we managed it. We have also begun to use props to act out the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.

See, I told you it had been a busy week!

I have been impressed at how quickly we have all settled back into Preschool life. Thank you for a great week everyone.

Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing you all next week
Tara