Preschool News 15.10.21

What a colourful week we have had in Preschool. We loved the story The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas so much last week, that we made this story the focus of our learning this week.

Building upon our learning from last week, we continued to support the Colour Monster in sorting his feelings as part of our personal, social and emotional development. We remembered much of the story and could identify each feeling, happiness, anger, sadness, fear, calm and love. We then discussed what makes us feel this way...
Happy – "Playing with my friends." "My family." "Jumping of the tyre".
Anger- "When my cat scratches me." "When my brother hurts me".
Sadness- "When I hurt my knee." "When my friends snatch the bricks from me."
Fear – "Monsters." "The dark".
Calm- "Watching twirly woos".
Love – "When mummy kisses me."

Following this for our activity, we were asked the question "How are you feeling today?" We then created our own colour monster to represent how we were feeling.

Through out the week we have been introduced to lots of new vocabulary, such as, excited, worried, confused, furious, caring, peaceful, tired, shocked, proud, scared, friendly etc then explored this vocabulary at different times of the day to describe how we feel as part of our communication and language development. For example, we discussed whether we were feeling happy or perhaps excited for our swimming lessons and whether we felt angry or frustrated or maybe even annoyed when a toy was snatched from us. It has been great to hear the children using this language when talking to each other and when trying to solve conflicts – what a grown up bunch of preschoolers you are and I am very proud of each and everyone of you.

In our physical development, we have continued to develop our fine motor skills. We have used tweezers to transport and sort objects into their correct colour group, we have used stampers to print shapes and we have continued with our daily squiggle sessions. We have also continued to develop our independence skills, did you know that most of us can now put on our own coat and apron all by ourselves and some of us can even manage our own zip – wow! It has been lovely to hear lots of excited children shouting "I did it!" I think we can safely say that we can identify what the feeling pride feels like.

To support our literacy development, we have been singing many nursery rhymes and our focus rhyme this week has been, If you're happy and you know it. We had lots of fun changing the words to represent different emotions.

During our mathematics sessions, we have been sorting colours and have continued to explore number 1. We again watched the numberblocks episode 'Meet 1' and then we created our own wonderful one picture. We then tried hard to use a stem sentence to talk about out pictures, e.g. I have one apple. Great job Preschool!

Colour has been the focus of our expressive arts and design development. We have been experimenting with colour and used small pipettes to transfer water and paint and discussed changes. It was wonderful to observe children build upon their prior learning of colour mixing and remembering which colour combinations create a new colour.

To support our well being, we painted pictures to cheery, happy music and we have taken part in Colour Monster Yoga. We definitely felt relaxed, peaceful and calm after these activities.

During our free play, we have been making wonderful observations outside of the world around us, noticing many signs of autumn and changes to our environment, we created a road for our cars, we have role played cats and puppies, we have enjoyed mark making outside with the chalks, constructed an obstacle course with the large construction blocks, worked together to complete jigsaws. It has been lovely to observe the children developing their friendships this week and working through and finding solutions to conflicts.

A reminder that next week is our pumpkin themed week, please come dressed as pumpkins/wear orange ready for a fun filled week.

Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to seeing all our little pumpkins next week.
Tara