Saltdean Pre-School

🦋 We had such a wonderful time at our first ever Forest School session led by Mr Coyne. The children enjoyed lots of exciting activities including making a mini fire, hammering flowers, creating flower petal play dough, adventuring across the rope bridge, building mini shelters and having fun on the rope swing.

Forest School provides wonderful opportunities for children to learn through hands-on experiences, take supported risks, build resilience, and develop a deeper connection with nature.

The children showed great confidence in trying new experiences and demonstrated fantastic turn-taking skills throughout the session. We are so proud of them all and hope to book another session soon! 🌿⛺️ 🌱

🌍 David Attenborough recently turned 100 and to celebrate we learnt all about him and what it means to be an explorer. We learnt lots of animal facts as well. The children made their own binoculars to spot nature in the garden and we watched some short clips from his nature documentaries. 🧭🗺️ We also hosted our own birthday parties in our role play area 🎊

💛🌻Last week was national mental health week and on Monday we welcomed Rosie, a mental health nurse to visit Pre-School. She led a workshop with the children about supporting their own wellbeing and what we can do if we are feeling sad or if someone close to us is feeling sad. The children learnt some positive mantras to help support their regulation and confidence🧘

❄️🌧️ We experienced an exciting hail storm during the middle of last week. Once the weather had settled, the children were eager to go outside and explore the ice that had been left behind. They showed great curiosity as they touched, collected and discussed the hail, talking about how cold and slippery it felt. This spontaneous interest in the weather led to a creative activity where the children made their own snowflakes using paper and scissors. ✂️❄️

🧸We said a fond farewell to Marianne a few weeks ago with some lovely singing in the playground. She has asked us to thank you all for an amazing send off and the unbelievable kindness of all the many gifts, bike vouchers and special messages she received. She was so touched and overwhelmed and will miss your children so much.

🤗 It’s been lovely to welcome our new practitioner Kate to Pre-School. She is really enjoying getting to know you all and your children. Thank you for making her feel so welcome.

🌍 We recently celebrated Earth Day. We marked it by painting our own planet earths and mixing our paint to match the colours. We also modelled some out of playdough.

♻️ We have been talking to the children about the importance of reusing and recycling. Last week we took a trip to the recycling bins and the children helped us to decide which bin our recycling should go in.

🦋 The children worked together as a team to make a beautiful butterfly from some wrappers and containers we have been collecting from lunch and snack.

🌷🌼 We repurposed some old flowers that could have been thrown away and instead the children have had lots of fun making petal potions with them.

🎨We also used the flowers to paint and print beautiful pictures. The children loved touching the petals and handling flowers. We learnt the names of the different parts of a flower.

🌱 We planted a tomato plant in the Pre-school garden. The children will continue to look after it and watch it grow. Everyone was so keen to help plant it out and water it. We have a lot of budding gardeners at Pre-School 😊🍅

Wishing you all a lovely weekend 🧸

Children's Church is back tomorrow!

Our wonderful Marianne is taking a well deserved break after working and being involved with pre-school for 33 years! This is her last week at Saltdean Pre-School. So many generations of local children lovingly nurtured by her. What an achievement! We will miss her so much but we are so pleased that she will be getting some time to herself in retirement. If anyone would like to send a message for a book we are putting together then please send to [email protected]

If you would like to contribute to her collection please ask us for the details. Thank you 🧸

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🧸 We had a lovely visit this week from Rev Louise who is the vicar at St Nicholas, our local church. She spoke to the children about Easter and she also read them a story ✝️

The children have been busy making beautiful Easter egg decorations out of clay. We hope you love them. Each one is so unique and beautiful 🥚🫟

We have also been busy planting sunflower seeds for the children to take home. We learnt about how plants grow and what we need to do to look after them. They practised writing their names on the labels and they decorated their own pots 🌻🌱 hopefully they will grow to be very tall 😊

We have had lots of fun with our music sessions. The children are learning how to control their instruments and to follow a simple rhythm 🥁 🎶

Yesterday we baked chocolate bread with the children to have at snack time 🧑‍🍳

We hope you like our sheep display which was inspired by our visits to Dolly and her lambs last week 🐑

Wishing you all a lovely Easter break, we return on Monday 13 April 🐣

🧸We have had such a special week!
We enjoyed two visits to see Dolly and her lambs! 🐑🐑🐑

We are so grateful to Mr Coyne who organised and led the sessions. The children loved learning lots of sheep facts and all about how farmers look after them 🐑

We all got to hold some fleece to feel how soft it is and learn about how it turns into yarn 🧶

We had a go at brushing some fleece and also walking like sheep. We also rolled on the grass which was so much fun 🤩

We even made our very own sheep inspired artwork to go on our display board. Each picture is so beautiful 🎨

Wishing everyone a lovely sunny weekend ☀️🧸

🧸 We have had so much fun at Pre-School recently 🧸

👶We had a wonderful visit from Becca and her baby. It was so special to see how kind and gentle the children were to baby. Lots of the children wanted to hold her 🥰

🍞🥖The children are really enjoying using our bread maker to make different flavoured breads for their snack including tomato and also banana bread. They are so proud of their bakes and eager to taste them🧑🏻‍🍳

📕We all had a lovely time celebrating World Book Day recently. We loved seeing everyone in their dressing up clothes and we visited the school library. We also enjoyed sharing the children’s books that they brought in and the staff’s favourite books as well 📖 We have plenty of World Book Day vouchers left so if you didn’t get one please let us know 🌍📚

🖌️The children have been very busy painting, they made their own Mother’s Days cards, each one was very unique. We have also enjoyed lots of painting and group art outside in the garden 🎨🧑🏻‍🎨

🪶We have been extending our knowledge of birds and wildlife by making our very own bird feeders 🐦‍⬛🐤 The children have been learning about why it’s important to help wildlife and the changes we can see in the seasons.

We are so excited to visit the lambs this week and will be learning more about farm animals and the work that farmers do in the coming weeks 🐑

✨We are hiring! ✨

Saltdean Pre-School are looking for a caring and enthusiastic Early Years Practitioner to join our friendly, supportive team.

✔️ Term time only
✔️ 14 hours 30 mins per week permanent
✔️ Additional temporary hours until Jan 2027 to cover maternity leave

If you are passionate about early years and love supporting young children to learn through play, we would love to hear from you.

News and vacancies – Saltdean Pre-school About UsSaltdean Pre-School is a small, friendly, and welcoming setting caring for up to 30 children aged 2–5 years. We are open term time only and between the hours of 8.10am-3.10pm, Mon-Fri.We have a well-established team and a strong focus on children’s interests, free play, and positive adul...