Arcville Playgroup & Toddlers

Hiya just a little reminder we are closed next week for half term. We re-open on monday 3rd November.

Dear parents/carers.

It has been a busy few weeks.

We have learnt all about Autumn and Harvest.

We went on a nature walk and collected some leaves. We then talked about how the leaves change colour and fall of the trees this time of year. Some children brought in some acorns, pine cones and some prickly green things that turned out to be conkers.
Using the leaves we collected we made some leaf print paintings.

During this week we had the story ‘How to catch a falling star’ which was about a bear that was waiting for the last star shaped leaf of autumn to fall.

Then we learnt about harvest. We had lots of fun vegetable printing with orange and red to make autumn pictures.

On the Friday we made vegetable soup. It was really yummy. Thank you to all parents who donated a vegetable. We had a great time chopping up sweet potato, an onion, a couple of potatoes and lots and lots of carrots.

When we finished making the soup we did vegetable printing. We used broccoli and potatoes to make some great prints to be used as leaves on our display board. Then it was snack time we had our yummy soup and some bread.

Our harvest story was the ‘Hungry Hen’ this is about a hen that ate a lot of wheat and slowly got bigger. A nearby fox wanted to eat the hen but all of us were shocked when the hen ended up eating the fox.

Last week we started looking at colour and shapes. This will be continued on to next week.

We had lots of fun with various colour and shape games last week. Especially in the table top area were we had a number and shape jigsaw. Some of us took the coloured pieces and matched them to objects around the room.

This weeks story was ‘The Green Queen’ it has lots of colours in it and we all did well recognising them.

In the construction area we had the sensory coloured blocks out that are different shapes. Some have water and sand in and others have mirrors.

A little reminder on Friday 17th October Michelle the family link worker will be in to talk and provide information and support about school admission forms and your child’s transition to school. If you can make it, it will be at 11am at playgroup.

See you Monday.

What a busy few weeks.

The children have settled into playgroup and the aunties have enjoyed learning about our new friends.

The first two weeks we had lots of fun exploring playgroup and enjoyed playing with all the exciting new toys. Some children did ‘All about me’ sheets on the graphics table and some of us drew our favourite things on ‘I like’ sheets. These can be seen on our display board.

This week we have had a ‘Teddy Bear’ week. Some children brought in our teddies and we had fun telling our friends about them. We had a teddy bear picnic in the role play area. We also wrote to bear on a bike in the graphics area.

This week’s story was bear on a bike. The story follows a bear that goes on a bike, train, boat, raft and carriage to different places. We had great fun at the end of story pretending to blast off in the rocket like the bear to visit the moon.

Yesterday we went outside on the bikes and had great fun racing each other. Auntie Sarah blew some bubbles and we had a great time chasing after them before the wind popped them. We also got a box to collect some leaves that are changing colour.

The next two weeks we will be looking at Autumn and Harvest. We have many exciting activities to do.

So if on your travels you find any leaves that are changing colour, acorns, conkers or anything else to do with Autumn please bring them in so we can talk about them at group time.

Thanks see you tomorrow. The aunties : )

Dear Parent/Carers,
I Hope everyone had a lovely week end. Last week our theme was transport and we focused on the story ‘Bear on a Bike’.
We had so much fun we are going to continue with the ‘transport’ theme this week but with a focus on other methods of transport, such as walking, taxi’s, buses and vehicles you might see on a building site or farm.

Thank you so much to all the parent helpers and parents who have brought in their pets from home. You do such a great job when you come in please come again. Also thank you for coming along to our drop in session with Sophie Weir our Family Link Worker who is always there if anyone needs any advice.

Dates for your Diary

Playgroup will be closed this Thursday due to voting but will be open as normal on Friday. We then close until Monday 2nd June for half term.

On Friday 18th July we are having our Parent and Staff night out at the Bistro. Please try to come, we always have a fun night out and the food is good too. Pop in and speak to Aunty Carys or Aunty Sarah if you want to take a look at the menu and put your name down.

Have a great week

All the Aunties at Playgroup.

Dear Parent/Carers,
I hope you all had a lovely Bank Holiday Monday. Some fantastic news, so far we have managed to raise:
£396.00 from our sponsored build

Thank you all so very, very much for all your help in raising this money. We will all get our heads together to come up with something fabulous for the children. If you have any suggestions pop them into our suggestion box. Maybe it would be nice to get something for our outside area? Let us know what you think.

Last week we started our Jack and the Beanstalk theme and scattered some magic beans over our compost heap. We also planted some beans and even had baked beans for snack. We had so much fun we are going to continue it for the rest of this week.

A little Note

Sophie Weir our Family Link Worker will be holding a drop in session next Wednesday 14th May at 10.45 in the Playgroup, where she will be discussing ‘Top tips to help children get the best start in nursery’. Please try to come along and after a chat and refreshments we will bring the children to you normal time.

From all the Aunties at Arcville

We hope you all had a lovely Easter break and just to let you all know we are open again on Wednesday.

We have really been enjoying our springtime theme and have been busy doing lots of fun activities. We have been outside to look at our Blossom tree and have made our own tree with blossom made out of popcorn. We have been learning all about baby lambs, calves, frogs and frogspawn and learning all about springtime weather. We have lots of lovely items in our springtime display now, such as daffodils, blossom, hyacinths, birdhouses, pinecones and we even have a piece off a tree that looks like a hedgehog that we are going to decorate.

Last week we have been continuing with our springtime theme but we will also be focusing on ‘our mummy's’ as it is that very special day today. We made lots of special crafts for our mummy’s and we all hope that you enjoyed them. We hope all that you had a very happy mothers day.

Thank you all so much for bringing in shoeboxes for our sponsored build, Keep them coming, the more we have the bigger the build.

We will also be holding a raffle (any donations would be greatly appreciated). Tickets are now on sale for 25p a ticket or £1 a strip.

Hope you all had a lovely holiday, the first 2 weeks back has gone so quick. Thank you all so much for dressing up and bringing in some lovely books to show us for World Book Week, we had so much fun. For our Snack we were joined by the Hungry Caterpillar. On Table Top we concentrated on The Gruffalo, with matching games using the different characters from the story and a game where we had to throw the dice and see how quick we could get away from the Gruffalo. We also did a Gruffalo dance in the physical area where we flew like owls, slithered like snakes, ran like fox’s and stomped like the Gruffalo. We were joined by Goldilocks and the three bears in the Home Corner, The Three Little Pigs in Construction and all the characters from the Dear Zoo Book, one of our favourites. In the Physical Area we all re-enacted the story of Timothy Pope, Timothy Pope who’s looking through his Telescope. We had all the characters from Shark in the Dark and Shark in the Park around the room and the children had great fun looking through the telescopes and seeing if they could spot them. We had a shark, a giant ice-cream, a seagull, a crow, a yacht, Timothy Pope’s dad and a cat.

Last week we started our ‘SPRING THEME’ and hopefully if the weather keeps dry we will be doing some gardening. We are developing our outdoor area around the back and adding some more natural materials such as plants, logs, wooden blocks to build with, bark etc… We hope to expand on our gardening patch and grow some more vegetables and more herbs for our herb garden. If any one has anything that they no longer need and feel may be useful to us please let us know.

Easter will soon be with us and in order to raise money for our Playgroup we will be holding a raffle (any donations would be greatly appreciated) and asking for all the children to bring in a shoebox which they can decorate with humpty dumpties. With these boxes we will be holding a ‘Sponsored Build’ (date to be confirmed). The children will build a wall as high as they can get it before it tumbles down with Humpty Dumpty. We will start decorating the boxes as soon as your child brings them in so that they are all ready for the event. Some sponser forms have been given out but if you haven’t yet received one then please ask one of the aunties for a sponser form.

Have a great weekend from All the Aunties at Arcville.

Last week we had so much fun and continued with our multicultural theme focusing on different types of music and musical instruments that we see around the world. We made some great instruments form drums to rain makers. We also looked at the different animals from different countries.

This week the children have chosen the theme themselves, it will be fairy tale theme week. We will be focusing on pirates, princess and dinosaurs. We will be creating a Jurassic park with logs and artificial plants. If anyone has anything that could be used which is no longer needed please feel free to bring it in so we can add it to our park. We will also be making an underwater dinosaur’s environment and making dinosaur eggs out of play dough and sawdust.

For the pirate and princess we will be making crowns, tiaras, pirate hats. We will also make maps and go for a hunt for treasure.

Can we also remind parents who haven’t yet brought in their funding forms together with evidence could you please bring them as soon as possible. There are still a few that we haven’t received.

See you all tomorrow :o)

This month has been a busy one.
We have started opening 9:00-11:30 and so far it’s proving positive with everyone. If any one does have any problems with this new arrangement please feel free to come and talk to either Carys or Sarah.

We are now also open on a Thursday so if you would like your child to attend on this day please let us know if you haven’t already done so. Don’t forget if you qualify for 3 year funding, you are entitled to 10 FREE Hours at Playgroup each week. This means you can bring your child in for the full four days without having to pay for sessions from the term from which your funding starts.

The outside play area around the back has become quite muddy due to the weather, so if possible could you please bring in a spare pair of wellies that your child can use and keep in playgroup.
We started the month off with the Theme “Shapes & Colours” and had fun with lots of different activities, such as building different coloured towers, matching games, creating pictures on the Mr Maker Table and playing outside on our bikes. The story for this week was “The Green Queen” which the children really enjoyed.
We continued our theme on ‘Shapes and Colours’ for another week and had lots of fun looking through the square, round and triangle windows to see what we can see. We have also been using a discovery box full of different shaped and coloured objects. The children have been busy mixing colours on the easel and also using a variety of other materials to paint on such as canvas. One of the children asked if we could make a rainbow, all the children enjoyed getting messy painting one for our display board.

Then we had a whole week on ‘all about me’ where we did self portraits and made artwork about our favourite things and pictures of our family. Some of us brought in pictures or belongings that are important to us and we talked about the objects with our friends.

Last week our theme was ‘Multicultural Week’ and Chinese New Year. We made maps of the world and the children matched up the different people that live around the world. We had a Chinese restaurant and takeaway, we danced to music from around the world and we enjoyed lots of tasty snacks such as, prawn crackers, fortune cookies, rice, and noodles. The children were fantastic at using the chopsticks, much better than the Aunties.
We had so much fun we have decided to extend the theme and the focus this week will be on the different types of music we hear around the world and the different animals that come from different countries.

A little reminder

Could all parents who received funding forms please bring them back into playgroup together with the evidence needed by Wednesday this week, so that we can send them off and get the process started.

We hope you have had a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Just a little reminder, we are back in playgroup on Wednesday this week (8th of January)

It was mentioned before we broke up for the holidays but playgroup will be having a trial run of opening at 9 am until 11:30 am instead. If this does become and issue then we will reassess further into the term.

See you Wednesday, the aunties :o)