Preschool News 14.01.22

What a super first full week we have had! Our new starters have settled beautifully into Preschool life and it has been lovely to welcome you all into our Preschool family.

This week we have jumped straight into our new learning and we have had lots of fun and giggles along the way!

As part of our communication, language and literacy development, we have listened to the story 'The Three Little Pigs' by Mick Inkpen. We discussed the characters within the story and have enjoyed joining in with repeated refrains and familiar phrases, our favourite being "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!" We have also enjoyed listening to the story 'The Three Horrid Pigs and the Big Friendly Wolf' by Liz Pichon. We then discussed the similarities and differences between the two stories.

In our writing activity, we have drawn a picture of the characters from our story and some of our older children attempted to mark 'p' for pig – wow!

During our talk for writing sessions, we created a story map and used our talk for writing actions to help us to recall and retell the story 'The Three Little Pigs'. We then used our role play masks to support our leaning and retelling of the story.

This week we also began our phonics sessions, our younger children have enjoyed using the boom whackers to explore and create sounds through banging, scraping, tapping. They also experimented to make loud and quiet sounds.

Our older children began their sessions following our read write inc script. First, we were introduced to some pictures and then we helped Fred to say the word. Please see Tapestry for some more information.

Within our personal, social and emotional development, Boris asked us to talk about the people in our homes that we love. We took it in turns to name the people that live in our house, then we shared what we love about the people in our house "I love daddy cos he plays games with me" "Mummy gives me cuddles". We then drew pictures of the people that live in our house. Boris reminds us, "We all need people who love us and who we can love".

We continued to talk about the people that live in our house as part of our understanding the world development. Using our photographs on Tapestry we talked about our families and discussed what makes our family unique, "I have two sisters" "I have a pet gerbil" "I don't have any pets".

We have enjoyed many activities to support our physical development, we have practicedkicking a ball, used scissors to cut and snip straws and have enjoyed our daily squiggle while you wiggle sessions. I can already see the benefit of these sessions through the children's drawing skills and much improved pencil grip.

We have recapped 'one', 'another 1' and 'two' as part of our mathematics development this week. We have been on number hunts to search for objects that represent these numbers and we have been working hard to use a stem sentence e.g. "One welly and another welly is two wellies". Great job everyone! Next week we will be introduced to the number three.

We have developed our construction skills within our expressive arts and design development. Using the photographs of our homes we looked at the different shapes and named parts of the home e.g roof, porch, and garage. We then chose the resources we wanted to make our homes from e.g boxes, toilet roll tubes etc. Next, we explored how we would fix these items together, the children were introduced to masking tape and with some support stuck their items together. We will add to our homes next week.

We were also set a task. Can you make a home for a pig that the wolf cannot blow down? Using playdough, sticks and straw we spent time making a home for a pig. Then, using the balloon pump we checked that our house could not be blown down. We had great fun experimenting!

During our free play, we have enjoyed the vehicles in the sand, role playing builders, building houseswith the blocks, role playing mums and dads, jigsaws, drew a road for the racing cars and much more...

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

Have a great weekend everyone and I look forward to another fun filled week next week
Tara