Stogursey Preschool- Little Acorns

My last post for Stogursey preschool..... I would like to thank all the staff and parents for my lovely gifts and cards. It has been a pleasure to have been part of the Stogursey school team for the last 2 (and nearly a half) years ❤️
Good luck to those in year 6 who will be moving up to secondary school later this year and to my 2 little superstars who will be going into reception.
To all my little acorns, continue to be the curious, adventurous, imaginative and affectionate personalities that you are ❤️
Love Julie x

Last week one of our core books was 'The very hungry caterpillar'. The children enjoyed learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. We went on a nature hunt to see if we could find our own hungry caterpillar. The children each had a magnifying glass and looked closely at leaves on the trees and hedges to find evidence of caterpillars. They got very excited when they found evidence of the caterpillars munching holes on the leaves. Sadly we didn't find any caterpillars but we did see lots of butterflies!
This week our core stories were 'The little mouse the red ripe strawberry and the big hungry bear' and 'Peck, peck peck'. The children enjoyed learning what new words such as 'disguise' and 'guarding' meant. They played a game, to test their listening skills, practiced their subsitising skills and explored mixing shaving foam and paint to mark make. We also had two visitors to preschool - 2 extremely large spiders that had decided to make their homes in Julie's welly boots! We caught them in a cup and took a look at them before releasing outside to make a new home!

For the last two weeks of term, we continued to learn about plants and how they grow. We looked at how bees pollinate flowers and planted our own radishes, carrots and chives, so we can watch them grow. The children made flowers from tiles and used numeral-quantity to complete the flower puzzles. Our core books were Lulu loves flowers and Going on a bear hunt.
The last week of term, we learnt about the origins of Easter and have been recalling the Easter story, which Reverend Alison has read to us over the last couple of weeks. We also read, Going on an egg hunt. The children made Easter themed cards and decorations. They counted Easter eggs and used their descriptive language skills to describe items they found inside plastic eggs. We also held our Easter stay and play session and egg hunt and would like to thank all who attended.

Due to not enough staff not being able to get into school safely this morning, to ensure the school is compliant with ratios, the hard decision has been taken to close the school today. This also includes the preschool.

We were sad this week, as Ashley had her last day with us on Monday. We will all miss her very much and I will especially miss her kind, happy, bubbly nature. She has been an absolute pleasure to work with and I hope that she enjoys her new role.
This week our core book is the Gruffalo. Reverend Alison came in and read the story to us on Wednesday morning after reading us the story of Moses. We were very impressed with her accents for the different animals in the story!
We used the colours of the gruffalo to add to gloop and then explored its properties as we applied pressure to solidify it, then release; to watch it turn back into a liquid.
Our maths focus was repeating patterns, where the children used a variety of gruffalo pictures to complete an AB pattern. We practiced our fine motor skills by using scissors to cut out a woodland scene and threading pictures of the gruffalo and used our gross motor skills by using the big gym equipment in the hall, where we balanced, jumped and rolled. We talked about how important it is to help wildlife in the winter as they struggle to find food and the children made bird feeders to take home, using fine motor skills to spread the peanut butter onto cardboard tubes, then rolling them in bird seed.We also went on a gruffalo hunt around the fields and past the castle. Unfortunately, we didn't find the gruffalo but we did find some nuts for the mouse!

This week at preschool we have been reading "Catch that chicken". The children enjoyed re-enacting the story in the tuff tray, using core language from the book as they played. For our maths activity this week, we used rulers to measure different sized chickens to find the biggest and smallest and counted as we measured. We joined Triscombe class on their welly walk to the old oak tree, where we looked at the differences in the environment from the last time we visited and noticed the fields had no crops and that the leaves had turned different colours or fallen from the trees...we also noticed how muddy the fields had become!
The children explored rhythm, using the African drums and copied the patterns of the beats that the adults played and made up their own rhythms.
The highlight of our week was meeting the very tame Chicken Licken, who was very well behaved and the children enjoyed walking her round the setting and petting her.
A big thank you to Claire for bringing her in.

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We are looking forward to welcoming the children back to preschool on Monday and hearing all about their Christmas holidays and what presents Father Christmas brought for them.
Our core books for week 1 will be 'Catch that chicken' and 'Duck in the truck'.