We Explored our Identities and What Makes us so Special!

Learning about ourselves is a key part of childhood development. We started the term with one of our favourite themes called ‘All About Me’. This is a terrific topic that really helps kids to boost their communication skills! Whether our children are telling us about their favourite colour, their most loved toy, or describing themselves and their families, they are also practicing using lots of lovely adjectives (describing words) to bring it all to life. One of the things we agreed that makes us unique is our name! So as part of our literacy learning, we spent time recognising, saying, and writing our own name! We even had a go at making our name out of playdough which is a fab way to boost those fine motor skills. Celebrating what makes us special and unique is a big part of what we do in preschool. We loved seeing how the children discovered different things about their friends! The best bit? It helps to build a community of socially conscious little people and strengthens our growing connections to those around us.

We Learnt About People that Help Us in Occupations Week

As part of learning about each other, we recognised that different people like different things. We thought about how these different interests might appeal to certain jobs when we get older. As part of Occupations Week, we were lucky enough to have Wimslow Police join us to talk about what they do and how they help people. We got to meet a real-life policeman, learn about his job and even go in the police car! Finding out about people that help us, about different jobs (and exciting new words associated with these professions) is a wonderful way to help children better understand the world around them.

We Read ‘Monkey Puzzle’ and Talked about Our Families.

One of the books we’ve really enjoyed this term is the Monkey Puzzle. This fab book is brilliant for bringing to life the concept of being part of a family and what it means to ‘belong’. As part of our ‘All About Me’ topic we explored how families can be different (they can come in all shapes and sizes) but also how every family is tied together with love. In this gentle story, we are whisked to the jungle where we meet a little monkey who had lost his mum! With the help of a friendly butterfly, and using the monkey’s (rather vague) descriptions, they search around the jungle to find her! We love the rhyme and rhythm of this tale as well as all the wonderful describing words used, as the plucky pair head on their search. Once we found out the little monkey does find his mum (phew), we had fun exploring the jungle ourselves! We listened to jungle sounds and had a go at describing lots of jungle animals by thinking carefully about how they look, sound and even how they move! We then practiced our pencil grip by tracing some jungle animal names to accompany our descriptions. We even had a cheeky lion sneak into preschool overnight (gasp!) and muddle up all our names – so we had to use our growing literacy skills and fab phonics to piece them back together! It was roarsome fun!

We Baked up Some Yummy Learning on National Gingerbread Day

As part of National Gingerbread day, we put our aprons on and headed to the kitchen to make our own gingerbread biscuits. Not just a yummy activity but a super way to bake some extra literacy, science and maths into the fun too! We made a list of all the ingredients we needed to make dough and read through the instructions in the recipe. The kids enjoyed discovering that when the ingredients were combined, their texture changed! We went from dry flour to sticky dough and then sticky dough to solid biscuits. We used our detective skills to pick out instructional words (first, next, then) from the recipe and talked about why they are important. We flexed our fine motor skills by kneading and rolling the dough and had a chance to discuss different shape names as we picked out our favourites to use for our biscuits. From weighing and measuring to decorating with our own designs, all that was left was to taste all our hard work!

We Enjoyed Lots of Super Celebrations

Celebrations are not only fun, but they are an important way for our children to boost their cultural capital. We can safely say, we’ve enjoyed every single celebration this term! We’ve painted fabulous firework pictures for Bonfire Night and talked about the mysterious Guy Faulks. We had a visit from RE on Demand who introduced us to the Hindu story of Rama and Sita and the significance of Diwali’s warm twinkling lights. We even got to design our own Diwali henna tattoos which are traditionally worn as symbols of positivity and good luck! We had a spooktacular time at our Halloween party where we wore our spookily cute fancy dress outfits as well as enjoying ourselves potion making and playing lots of spooky games. To finish off the term in TOTAL festive flair, we’ve performed our Nativity to all our preschool parents which was INCREDIBLE. We get goosebumps thinking about it! From remembering to use big voices so everyone could hear us to remembering all their lines (and actions), there wasn’t a dry eye in the building! Proud is an understatement!



 

We told you we’d been busy! We might already be bursting with excitement about our Spring term plans – but we’ll keep a lid on them until Santa does his thing! So, as we grab a mince pie and get ready to enjoy some festive family time, here’s a big, warm Merry Christmas hug from us to all our amazing Preschool children and families!