Squirrels Preschool, Highwoods, Colchester

A fun Friday🐿️

We made our own butterflies on our craft table using sponges. The children could add their own patterns and designs onto the sponges using paint before pushing these onto some paper🦋

Today is also World Environment Day. So on our mark making table we had environmental colouring. The children spoke about how we can protect our planet and what we can do to be sustainable. 🌍

The children enjoyed many different activities today such as the dolls house, wooden blocks and bugs and also the ramps and cars in the garden🚗.

⭐️Links to the EYFS:
🌱Learning about the world (UTW)
🌱Exploring patterns (EAD)
🌱Making complex small world (PSE/EAD)

🗣️Today on our mark making table we developed our phonological awareness by playing a game of I spy. We concentrated on the “a” and “s” sounds and worked together to find the pictures that matched our two sounds. We then extended this by looking around our environment to see if we could find any different “a” and “s” sounds. This is a fantastic and fun way to talk about sounds and develop our communication skills.

🍦 The tuff tray today was set up to make lots of ice creams! The children enjoyed scooping and filling their cones with their choice of ice cream flavour. This led to some engaging role play making, decorating and pretending to eat their ice cream. “Look at my ice cream sundae” one child said who had added a red Pom Pom to make a cherry on top 🍒. Once all the ice cream was gone the children worked together to mix some more up and carry on the fun.

🧁 Following ice cream, with had our pretend rice crispie cakes to make too. Lots more scooping and mixing and pretending to enjoy the rice crispie cakes.

🌻 On our craft table we made sunflowers! We used toilet rolls to create our beautiful yellow petals, bubble wrap to create the centre of our flower and painted on a stem with leaves. The children really enjoyed creating their flowers, counting how many petals are on their flower and explaining that bees love flowers! 🐝

🌧️ The rain this afternoon led to some interesting discussions. A rather large puddle formed in our garden and one child declared “Look, that puddle it’s gigantic, it’s made a flood!”. This prompted us to sing songs about the rain, remembering ‘I hear thunder’, which the children learnt for nursery rhyme week last Autumn.

Links to the EYFS:
⭐️ Developing phonological awareness
⭐️ Exploring natural phenomena like the weather
⭐️ Developing gross motor skills
⭐️ Remembering past events

We had a builders tuff tray today👷‍♂️Within it we had construction vehicles and different pasta shapes and sizes. We used the diggers to scoop, push, lift and pour the pasta from vehicle to vehicle 🚜 This then led onto a conversation about food. “I like pasta for dinner” 🍝

We had a tuff tray full of lots of sensory toys to explore. We had pop it’s, squares of different materials so they children could feel them, sensory bottles and stacking cups. The children enjoyed exploring these toys and were talking about what colours they could see in the bottles, they were stacking the cups up high, and seeing the difference between the squares🌈

On our mark making table we were exploring life cycles of frogs, caterpillars, chickens and plants. The children were able to colour their own life cycles and talk about what they remember.🐛🐥🐸🌱

On our craft table we incorporated our love of Elmer 🐘 and celebrated how everyone is different, we used different colours to print hand prints and compare shapes and sizes, making sure the children understood the importance of being individual, this was followed by a carpet time where we continued these discussions and read Elmer 📕.

After lunch on our craft table we set up an activity where the children were able to make their own cars or vehicles of their choosing. They were using paper plates and tissue paper to decorate their own cars🚗🚙. The children enjoyed watching this be set up and went straight to making their own ones.

This afternoon was very wet so we got out the balance beams to set up an indoor challenge, the children worked together to fit the pieces together and organise themselves into groups to take turns. They spent time practicing their balancing and social skills🤸

We also had out the water paints and a roll of paper to give space to create as they wish, sparking imagination and creating stories from the pictures they painted🎨.

⭐️links to the EYFS:
❤️ identifying pasta shapes and sizes - M
💙celebrate being different- PSE
💜 use different mediums to create art -EAD
💛balance on different platforms-PD
💙 exploring life cycles- UTW
💜exploring colours- EAD

A Date for the diary, unfortunately it’s been unavoidable, and we apologise for the late notice.
Emails have gone out so this is just a reminder

First aid training has to be done, before our current certificates run out. So for us to be able to open it’s had to be a school day, we did try to sort other times but this was not possible so we have had to close for a day unfortunately.

Today we enjoyed some wonderful weather themed activities! ☔🌧️☀️

⭐️At the craft table the children decorated ice cream cone pictures using paint and sponges, developing their creativity and fine motor skills while exploring different colours and textures.

⭐️We also investigated how rain clouds work at our tuff tray using cotton pads, blue-coloured water and pipettes.
The children carefully squeezed the pipettes to make the "rain" fall from the clouds, helping them understand weather through hands-on play.

⭐️Out in the mud kitchen, the children had lots of fun making their own "Ant Soup" 🐜🥣. They mixed mud, leaves and water using their imaginations and developing their communication.

A fantastic day full of exploration, creativity and learning through play! 😊

🌈Links to EYFS
⭐️EAD– Use imagination and pretend play.
⭐️PD – Developing our hand muscles through squeezing pipettes.
⭐️UTW – Explore weather and observe cause and effect.

This half term we will be exploring planting and life cycles of plants and animals and also school readiness🌱

We would love to know how you are getting school ready at home and over the next few weeks will we share how we are supporting the children to be school ready🏫

Happy Friday! ⭐️😁

Tomorrow is “World Turtle Day” 🐢 we have celebrated this today with lots of Turtle themed activities such as ‘under the sea’ drawing pictures, painting our own turtles, learning new facts about these animals and exploring other under the sea animals and creatures. We have also had sea sounds playing in the background pretending we are at the beach! 🌊
“They live on land and water”
“The have a big shell”
“They lay eggs”

On the malleable table we created our own under the sea gloop! This encouraged the children mix the water, blue and green paints, glitter and corn flour to create this independently. The children used a variety of tools to mix this all together and enjoyed this sensory experiences. 🥣🥄

We have had lots of fun in the garden today, we had a creation station using a variety of recycled items, we painted and created a lovely art piece together. 🎨🖌️

In the tuff tray we had hidden letters in the sand with a variety of objects, we enjoyed finding the letters and saying the letter sounds. 🔤 We found the objects such as dinosaur, orange, elephant and said the phonic sounds which they begin with.

We have some new equipment in the garden and the children were so excited to give these a try! The children enjoyed using the equipment and using our bodies in different ways, this also encouraged lots of turn taking, developing our physical, social and sharing skills.

The children loved the bubbles tuff tray in the gardencesying their own bubbles! 🫧

This afternoon the children enjoyed music and movement time, they showed us all their dance moves and joined in with the actions of nursery rhymes.

We then enjoyed a story in the garden with an ice lolly treat to end week.

⭐️Hope all our children and families have a lovely may half term break ⭐️

Reminder: Please suncream your child before the preschool session, bring in suncream for your child to apply and sun hats! ☀️☀️☀️

⭐️links to the EYFS:
❤️Exploring colours (EAD)
💙use our bodies in a variety of ways (PD)
💜 learning new facts and vocabulary (CL) (UTW)
💛use a variety of tools (PD)
💙 enjoy hands-on exploration activities (EAD)
💜move bodies to music (PD) (EAD)

What a colourful day we have had today🌈

Today is Elmer day🐘so we have had many fun, colourful, elephant inspired activities today. On the craft table we were able to make our own Elmer the elephants using different coloured tissue paper and we were using our imagination to make our own elephants who could be in the stories too📚.

In our tuff tray we had an amazing sensory Elmer the elephant where the children could play with coloured rice and pasta. The children enjoyed mixing the coloured foods together to make a new elephant of their own design🐘🌈.

On our mark making table we were able to use our amazing imaginations to colour our own elephants and design them ourselves🌈. The children loved picking different colours to make their own elephants “I have a yellow one” “My one is purple and grey”.

We love celebrating Elmer day as it shows that everyone is different in their own ways and it is good to be unique. We spoke a lot about this during our carpet time whilst reading “Elmer and the lost teddy”🧸.

🌈The Elmer books are lovely stories because it tells us it is okay to be different and shows us that everyone is an individual person and no 2 people are the same and that is okay.

⭐️links to the EYFS:
❤️Exploring colours (EAD)
💙Counting (M)
💜Talking about ourselves (PSE)
💛Reading stories (L)

🐝 world bee day 🐝

https://www.fao.org/world-bee-day/en

We have has a buzzing day,
We had lots of beautiful yellow sparking yellow water in with flowers, the children used pipettes to strengthen their motor skills collecting the water just like the Bess would collect nectar. 🌺

In the construction area the children made a bug house, it was home to “Stag beetles, ants, snail, slugs live in the garden, Dragonflies come and fly in too” 🪲

We made bumble bees on the craft table, most children made these independently showing their interpretation skills, and noticing what is needed to make it look like a bee. “Wings, eyes “ “ it needs black stripes” 🐝

We made bee’s from play dough this afternoon adding stripes of black paper to yellow play dough.

There has been soo much learning about habitat, food, anatomy and life cycles today, we shared a story about bees at carpet time and spoke about where we find them.

Focus days are an important way of learning about what’s important to the planet and why

Links to the eyfs
Learn about the world arround us-UW
explore natural patter-M
Learn new vocabulary-L

Half term challenge sponsorship forms started to come home today.
Such a lovely opportunity to raise money for end of term treats