We have got to the end of our first half term in Pre-School and what a truly wonderful few weeks we've have had.

The weeks have flown by but looking back we have fitted in a lot of learning and fun from playing outside with the cars, bikes, skittles, sand and water to name a few in the sunny weather which started off our new term in September to autumn welly walks around the school field to look for autumn treasures as the season and weather started to change, to cooking cakes and biscuits, making fruit kebabs, joining in with a whole school danceathon, enjoying listening to the children with our weekly show and share activity and finally pumpkin themed activities to finish.

Our topic heading for Autumn Term 1 was "Who Am I?" and we have been learning
All About me, Keeping Healthy, Homes and Houses, and Families/Diversity.

We have been focusing on a different book each week and started off our new term with The Great Big Book of Families by Mary Hoffman.
The other books we have covered are Daisy, Eat Your Peas! by Nick Sharratt, In Every House on Every Street by Jess Hitchman, Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers, The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming and ended this week with The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiano.

The children really enjoy the books that we share with them and all the activities that we link to them throughout the weeks.

We also had our first birthday to celebrate this week and would like to thank Charlie for bringing in some delicious cakes to share with us to celebrate his 4th birthday.
We all hope you had a super day.

Our next terms topic heading is "How Do We Celebrate?" We will be learning all about Seasonal Changes - Halloween, Bonfire Night, Remembrance Day, Birthdays, Diwali, Christmas and Chanukah.
This is always an exciting half term with lots of chance to discuss different celebrations that happen around the world and to get all festive with plenty of sparkles to add along the way!

The weather has certainly now changed, with this in mind we only have a few items of spare clothing in Pre-School so please may we ask that all children have some spare clothes that can be left in Pre-School on your child's coat peg. Please can you also name any items of clothing/coats and wellies so it is easier for us to keep these items with the correct children especially since they are in and out of them throughout the day.

Please may we also ask parents/carers of those children that are still in nappies to check their bags and replenish any supplies if required.

We hope that you all have a wonderful half term break and we are very much looking forward to seeing you all in the week beginning Monday 30th October.

With best wishes Mrs G, Mrs Rickard, Mrs Rowe and Miss Carr.

I have added a selection of photos at the bottom to show some of the wonderful things we have done during the last 7 weeks.

What another wonderful week we have had.

Our book this week was "Here we are!" Written by Oliver Jeffers.

Written as a manual to life on Earth from new dad Oliver Jeffers to his baby son, this simple, life-affirming picture book is both an overview of Earth and a guide to living well.

We had great fun creating our own planet paintings using balloons and made playdough people, planets and the moon.

We also baked some biscuits and decorated them with icing to make our own biscuit planets, which were very yummy.

We have match, ordered and sorted planets, stars and rockets for our maths focus this week and sung lots of songs including - Ten little men in a flying saucer, Hey diddle diddle and Twinkle twinkle little star.

On Tuesday we went over to forest school where we met up with Class One during their outdoor learning, we explored, played and found lots of autumn treasures to take back and add to our finds from the Friday before, we all love this time of year as there is so many different colours and textures around in our natural environment.

We have been practising our cutting and sticking skills to make some scarecrows to add to our display and some beautiful autumn sun catchers using coloured tissue paper to go our our windows.

Our Show and Share list is up in the entrance hall with days for your child to bring in an item linked to our half termly theme, this being Autumn and Harvest.

We have our whole school Harvest Festival this coming Monday 9th October at the church starting at 2.30pm which Pre-School will be attending, it would be lovely to see as many of our friends there as possible.

We have been learning one of the songs that will be sung during the service which is "Big, Red Combine Harvester"  and the children have done really well remembering the words.

Please may we also have a family photo to add to our Families board in Pre-School, it gives the children lots of opportunities to discuss with their friends who is in their photo and we have had some lovely stories about what they are up to.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend and enjoy the sunshine.

We are looking forward to seeing you all next week for some more autumn fun and activities.

Mrs G, Mrs Rickard, Mrs Rowe and Miss Carr.

This week in Pre-School the children have been learning and discussing ways to ‘Keep ourselves healthy’. We have enjoyed sharing our ideas and talking about things such as exercise, sun safety, eating healthy foods, drinking water, brushing our teeth and even getting enough sleep to name a few. We have used conversation card to help prompt our own thoughts on what fruits and vegetables we like and dislike. This worked well alongside our book of the week ‘I really don’t like peas’. We also sorted fruits and vegetable into their colour groups. We found green to have the most!

The children have worked well together to sort foods in to ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ boxes. We also discussed how these ‘unhealthy foods’ could be seen as occasional treats as we all enjoy them but that if we ate birthday cake everyday it wouldn’t be so special, and that our body needs a healthy balance of all types of foods.

We have been busy painting lots of different types of fruits and vegetables in readiness to create a ‘Keeping Healthy’ display.
We also practiced our counting using frozen peas, the challenge was to pick the peas up using tweezers, so not only were the children using their counting skills but also improving their fine motor accuracy too
We have also enjoyed baking some cakes on Thursday and Friday we made some fruit kebabs talking about which fruits we like the most.

The children enjoyed some Cosmic Yoga sessions this week, they were all fantastic Betsy Bananas to keep in with our healthy food theme.
Also this week some of the children participated in the whole school ‘Danceathon’ with the Pre-School children completing 15minutes of dance, we also joined in with Class one and two with their danceathon in the main school hall which was great fun! Well done everyone.


We hope everyone has a lovely weekend. Mrs Rickard, Mrs G, Mrs Rowe and Miss Carr.

Hello everyone,

We are already at the end of week 2, it has been such a lovely week of more play, learning, creating and exploring within Pre-School.

We have welcomed some more new friends, and we hope that they have thoroughly enjoyed their first sessions with us.

We have enjoyed lots of outside time before the weather starts to turn, some of the children have noticed how the trees are beginning to change and drop their leaves.
Such a lovely observation for children to make and to start to understand the changing of the seasons.

With note to this, can we please ask that you child has a named pair of wellies kept in Pre-School so that we can enjoy some welly walks around the school and to enjoy the outside areas whatever the weather!

This week our focussed book has been 'The Great Big Book of Families' which is a lovely well written and illustrated book to show children the many different kinds of family.

The children were keen to talk about their own families and have enjoyed some activities relating to this including using puppets to show their own family members, this led to lots of imaginative play.
We also enjoyed making lollipop stick houses with pictures of our family members inside.

We introduced some short phonics sessions this week, exploring environmental sounds. The children enjoyed a game of 'Sleepy Sofa' where they had to use their good listening skills to correctly guess the sound that woke them up!
We also enjoyed using some of our instruments and focussed on those that we could shake. The children listened to instructions to shake 'quietly' or loudly' and then to a 'stop' instruction. We all then said what our favourite instrument was and what it sounded like. The most popular being the bells because it sounded like Santa's Sleigh

Thank you to all of you that have sent photos in of your own family enjoying the summer.
We will be using these photos this week for our "Show and Share", to enable the children to talk about who is in their own family.

If you haven't sent a photo in you can email it to us at preschool@pelyntprimary.co.uk

We are looking forward to another full week of fun and activities next week on healthy eating and keeping ourselves healthy.

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Rickard, Mrs G, Mrs Rowe and Miss Carr.