Preschool News 17.02.22

This week has flown by and we have enjoyed lots of fun and learning together!

On Monday, we enjoyed a Valentine's day theme. We began with a circle time session, we had to wait our turn, then when we had hold of the heart puppet we shared with the group who we love and why. Next we drew a picture of the people we love inside a heart. During the morning we used water colours to paint a bouquet and used paint and tissue paper to make a heart hat. Thank you for a great day filled with love.

During our HeartSmart session as part of our personal, social and emotional development, we learned to notice when a friend needs our help. To begin we were split into two groups. Group 1 placed a bean bag on their head and group 2 were told that they were going to be the helpers. Group 1 moved around the room to music whilst balancing the bean bag on their head. If the bean bag fell off we had to freeze and wait for a helper from group two before we could move again. Group 2 were encouraged to watch their friends carefully and be ready to help. We then swapped groups. We ended our session with a challenge. We were all given a bean bag to balance whilst looking out for our friends who need our help at the same time. Boris says "It is good to help our friends".

To support our literacy development, we have continued with our daily phonics sessions. Our younger children have made lots of noise this week with our preschool musical instruments. We have learnt some new vocabulary such as maraca, tambourine, rainmaker, and jingle bells. We have explored how the instruments make noise by banging, shaking and tapping. The instruments have been used to accompany us while singing our favourite nursery rhymes. We enjoyed marching round the playground like the Grand old Duke of York with our instruments, shaking high and low, loud and quiet and freeze...!

Our older children learned to identify the next two sets of the RWI picture cards, 'flower, leg, egg, horse, robot, vulture, yak, jack in a box, worm and zip' and enjoyed the game, 'Animal Fred.A reminder that at this stage we do not want the children to be able to read the sounds but HEAR the sounds in words. For example, can they hear when an adult orally segments a word e.g. h-e-d, it makes the world head.We also continued to clap out syllables. Finally, we ended each session singing some of our favourite nursery rhymes.

Please see Tapestry for your phonics home link.

In our mathematics sessions, we were introduced to the shapes circle and triangle. We learned to identify the shapes by their properties, for example, a circle has one curved side and a triangle has three straight sides. We enjoyed a shape hunt in our outdoor environment and printed with shapes.

To support our physical development, we have taken part in our daily squiggle sessions, enjoyed the peg board challenge, enjoyed time on the adveture playground and our older children have contiued to trace lines.

For our understanding the world development, we explored what is meant by community. We learned that it is a group of people living in the same place. Next we discussed that we have community at home, preschool and church. After that, we talked about significant places that are close to our homes and form part of our community. Finally, we talked about our favourite places within our community and mapped them in relation to our homes.

Some of the activities we have enjoyed during our free play, include, role playing dogs, climbing trees, making dens, completing jigsaws, role playing teachers, building sandcastles and constructing vehicles.

Thank you for a wonderful half term Preschool, you are all SUPERSTARS and I am very proud of you all.

Have a fantastic break and I look forward to seeing you on Monday 28th February ready for a ROARsome half term ahead!
Tara