Preschool News 24.09.21

This week has flown by Preschool...

In our communication and language development, we listened to the story 'Autumn' by Ailie Busby and have been introduced to some new vocabulary, such as, acorns, rustling leaves, blustery, windy, blackberries, conkers, autumn colours, collect, splash, apple crumble, precious. We enjoyed bringing these words to life during the week. We are hoping to be able to splash in muddy puddles very soon. We also took time to explore the pictures on each page and talk about what we could see, "The squirrel is in the bed" "Two pumpkins" "Red apples and green apples" "Leaves falling to the floor" "They are kicking leaves".

To support our personal, social and emotional development, this week we began our HeartSmart sessions and we were introduced to Boris the robot. We watched a short film 'Meet Boris'. We then looked at a picture of Boris and thought about what he was made from, "hard stuff". After a closer look we observed colanders for shoulders, an old radio for his body and he even had a heart made from cogs. We learned that Boris is made from scrap from the scrapyard – things that people have thrown away. We then listened to the story about how Boris was made from junk at the scrapyard.
'He was put together from old gears and cogs and other unwanted bits and bobs. By two young children called amber and Josh and when he was done, they named him Boris and gave him a heart'.
We discussed that the children loved Boris but the scrapman from the scrapyard told Boris that he was made of junk and rubbish and that no one could ever love him. We discussed who we should listen to "Not nasty people" "You have to be kind" "The scrapman isn't nice". We are pleased to say that Boris did not listen to the scrapmans words but that of the children who filled his heart with love.
Boris says, 'Let love fill your heart'. Thank you for teaching us how to become HeartSmart Boris.

We have certainly been risk takers this week as part of our physical development. We have been climbing trees, jumping from the large tyre, swinging from branches and we have overcome some challenges on the adventure playground – did you know, most of us can now climb up and over the climbing frame – wow!
We have also enjoyed lots of activities to support our fine motor skills, we have used a knife to chop apples, used scissors to snip paper and we began our dough disco sessions. Dough disco involves moulding play dough in time to music and performing different actions such as rolling it into a ball, flattening it, putting each individual finger into the dough, rolling it into a sausage and squeezing it. These actions help to strengthen muscles in our fingers and hands which will support our pencil grip.

In our literacy sessions, we began our talk for writing unit and have been introduced to the story 'Rosie's Walk' by Pat Hutchins. After creating our very own story map we used talk for writing actions to help us recall and retell the story. We have also enjoyed many walks in our outdoor environment to explore the positional language found in our text and have experimented with different ways of moving around, under, over and through objects. It has been lovely to observe the children read this story to each other.

We have continued to sort colour and objects during our mathematics sessions. We grouped small world family characters into size, colour, and family members e.g babies, dads, sisters and pets. Then we counted how many we had of each group and discussed who had more and less. I have been super impressed at our sorting and counting skills.

Autumn has continued to be the focus of our understanding the world development and we marked the beginning of autumn with our very own autumn party on Wednesday. We made sure we were properly dressed for the occasion! We used autumn leaves to create our own autumn crowns. We have also been very lucky to go apple picking in our very own orchard and used these apples to prepare apple crumble to share at home with our families. It has been lovely to hear how delicious it was from many of you.

After learning our new autumn song (see below) we enjoyed creating pictures with autumn colours within our expressive arts and design development. We used some of the leaves from our autumn walks around the school grounds to create a red, orange, yellow and brown autumn wreath.

'Leaves are changing, leaves are changing
All around, all around
Red and yellow, orange red and yellow orange
Some are brown, some are brown'

We have also been enjoying singing nursery rhymes using our nursery rhyme props and enjoying our new nursery rhyme CD. We have even added extra percussion with bells and tambourines.

We have been super busy during our free play too. Some of the activities we have enjoyed have been, washing the babies, building towers with the blocks, caring for our babies, weighing objects, completing jigsaws, role playing in the home corner, creating noise with the boom whackers, exploring musical instruments, listening to nursery rhymes on the cd player, sharing stories together, chasing games and lots and lots of climbing and swinging from the trees and equipment.

I think we definitely deserve a well earned rest this weekend!

Happy autumn hunting Preschool
Tara