Welcome Back Preschool

It has been lovely to welcome everybody back this week. We have taken time to settle back into our rhythm and routines and have jumped straight into our new topic 'minibeasts'.Our learning this term will be based around the story, 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle.

To support our personal, social and emotional development, we have been playing board and card games. Minibeasts snap has been our favourite game to play. These games help us to develop our turn taking skills.

To support our communication and language development, we have explored new vocabulary, including cocoon, pupa, chrysalis, metamorphosis, life cycle, caterpillar and butterfly as well as learning names of lots of different types of minibeasts. We have shared fiction and non fiction stories to help us develop our understanding of these words.

To support our fine motor development, we have continued to enjoy our daily dough disco sessions and we have thread cheerios onto pipe cleaners to make our own hungry caterpillars.

During our literacy sessions, we have shared the story , 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle. We will be learning to speak this story as part of our T4W unit. For our writing activity, we have drawn a picture of the character from mour story. Our older children have also continued to develop the letter formation within their name and within the sounds m a s d t – keep up the good work!

Subitising has been the focus of our mathematics sessions this week. To develop our subitising skills we played the game Ladybird Spots. We rolled the dice and attempted to say the amount without using our fingers to count. Then, we had to find a card with the same amount of spots on. Finally, we turned our card over and again attempted to say the amount without counting. We have also recapped our learning of the numbers 1-5 and have been counting an amount to match a numeral. For our activity, we added the correct amount of pegs to match the number on our laminated spiders. We are that clever in Preschool that some of us even managed to work with numbers above 5 – wow!

We have enjoyed hunting for minibeasts in the school grounds as part of our understanding the world development and have enjoyed observing some minibeasts in Preschool. Thank you to Lucas for sharing his ant farm and bringing in a snail.

For our expressive arts and design development, we have begun to learn the song 'There's a Tiny Caterpillar'. We have added actions to help us recall the song. We have also been busy painting and drawing minibeasts.

We have been super busy during our free play time too, we have washed babies, created shadow pictures, flapped around the garden like butterflies, hunted for minibeasts, played tennis, shared stories, drawn pictures and much more.

Thank you for a wonderful first week to our final term together. This has to be one of my favourite terms of the year as I get to feel such immense pride at how much you have all grown during your time at Preschool. You are all superstars.

Keep shining!
Tara