Life at POD Preschool – Spring Term
As our Spring Term at Preschool draws to a close, we wanted to share some of the highlights and learning themes. It might help put all that at-home chatter and questions into perspective too!
Spring Term #1 runs from the New Year to the February Half Term and the theme for the term was ‘animals.’ It was really exciting for the children as we spent 6 weeks exploring many different groups of animals from around the world. From land animals to sea creatures, nocturnal animals to farm animals, jungle animals to the smallest of bugs!

To bring our learning to life we invited Junglescapes to POD to share with us some of their most wonderful creatures. The children met a cockroach, stick insect, jumping tree gecko, land gecko, tarantula and a rare red bearded dragon!

children with a lizard and snake learning about animals

This experience was also the start of our ‘I’m a Preschooler, Get Me Out of Here’ project. Our two Preschool classes went head to head to earn stars during different challenges. There was a star hunt, sensory challenge and even an ‘eating’ challenge…would you eat bug brains?! Not forgetting the grand finale - our Preschool Cyclone! The children absolutely loved this! They even made it on to ‘TV’ – check them out!

 



 

Spring Term #2 takes us up to the Easter holidays. As the season begins to change our topic focussed on new life and Spring.

Spring is the perfect time to explore our ‘senses’ and the children have been using all of their five senses to find out more about Spring. We listened to lambs bleating, tasted hot cross buns, smelt daffodils, observed caterpillars and felt spring showers on our skin!

Our children were so intrigued by the caterpillars that we’ve welcomed 5 tiny caterpillars into Preschool! It’s been brilliant for the children to watch them grow and change each day.

This also supported the learning around our book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has sparked a whole host of activities. From writing our own wonderful lists of what the caterpillar ate, to drawing our own frogs following a step by step guide.

Spring is an exciting time for outdoor learning. The children have been planting some young plants and starting to explore their different parts as they thrive in the garden planters. They even become botanical scientists, performing plant based experiments and making their own grass heads.

early years children learning about spring

Every term we have our Mega Minds sessions where the children learn about a topic of their choice! So far, we have learnt about China, bugs, dinosaurs, spaghetti (it’s nothing but varied) and there’s so much more to come!

In French the children have continued to learn about their emotions and are now brilliant at the Bonjour song…perhaps you’ve heard it at home?

And, amongst all this we’ve introduced new games and activities to keep everyone moving! We’ve continued our street dance classes and built on our POD-Bop dance sequence with some new moves such as pin steps…watch out Strictly! Grant has also taken to the court to teach the children how to ‘shoot hoops’ on their very own outdoor basketball court. Of course there’s been plenty of b-ball banter too having everyone in fits of giggles!

It truly has been a jam-packed Spring term and we hope our Preschoolers have enjoyed it as much as we have. With Summer term just around the corner we’ve got plenty more magic up our sleeves to delight and inspire little minds. Watch this space.
If you’d like to find out more about the practical magic we can bring to your family please get in touch.
Call 07581 156684 or email sophie@practicallyfamily.co.uk