Exciting Christmas times!

What a wonderful night we had at the Christmas Concert last Friday! The children were fantastic and we are so proud of all of them. For children aged only 2 and a half to just 4 years old, they did amazingly.

  

The concert was also a successful fundraising event for us, and we raised around £1,100. All the money we raise through fundraising goes directly towards improving the facilities we can offer to the children, and we are so grateful for the support of all our parents and other family members who make this possible.

Some more exciting news - we applied for a grant from Oberthur, a company who have a base in Tewkesbury, and our application was successful. We received a cheque for £2500 this week, which will be used for the next phase of development of the inside of the building, and also to purchase a touch screen computer.

And lastly, we entered a Christmas e-card competition run by PATA (a Gloucestershire-based pre-school alliance), using a card made by our children, and we won! Jenny Miles from PATA has been to visit us to deliver our winners certificate and some new books. Here is the winning card:

Wishing all our children and their families a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to seeing you all again in 2015!

Feeling Festive!

We have been getting into the Christmas spirit at Pre-School, and have started trying on costumes and practicing songs ready for our Christmas Concert on 12th December.

We have also been doing some Christmas crafts.

We'll be bringing them home to show you at the end of term!

Biscuits and Poppies

We really enjoyed decorating biscuits this week. Jane showed us how to make the icing and put it onto the biscuit.

Then we had a go ourselves...

We chose different toppings to sprinkle onto our biscuits...

And the best part was eating them at snack time!

Lots of the children had been to watch the Remembrance Parade in town on Sunday, and were interested in talking about Poppy Day. They enjoyed making poppies by gluing red and black paper onto paper plates. They also took part in the silence on Tuesday.

Bonfire Night

Our Majors and Minors children had a great time last week celebrating Bonfire Night.

We made colourful marble pictures of fireworks...

We used junk modelling to make rockets...

 

 

We went over to the school hall and acted out being fireworks, making whooshes and bangs, and played "Ten Little Fireworks"...

 



And we learned about how to stay safe when playing with sparklers...

 

 



Bikes and Robots!

We had lots of fun last week playing outside on the bikes and scooters, enjoying the autumn sunshine. We also talked about the noises cars and motorbikes make, and made some of those noises ourselves while we were playing.

We also did some junk modelling to make robots. We had been talking about the sounds machines make, such as the rides we saw at the Mop Fair, and the noise the dustbin lorry made when it came past Pre-School. We talked about the noises our robots might make when we pushed the different buttons.

Our robots looked fantastic!

Nursery Rhymes

Our Minors children are learning about nursery rhymes this term. Last week we read "Little Bo Peep", and the children made sheep pictures using cotton wool.

Animal Sounds!

As part of our topic of Sounds, last week we talked about the sounds different animals make.

We used animal-shaped sponges and plastic toy animals dipped in paint to make pictures.

We also made sock puppets and talked about what animal we had made and what sounds they make.

Hide and Seek with Red Ted

The Majors children had a great time this week playing a game of hide and seek with Red Ted. One of the children stayed in the little star room while Red Ted was hidden somewhere in the main room.

Then the child came out and searched for Red Ted. The other children helped by clapping quietly if the child was far away from Red Ted, and louder as they got closer to him.

The game helped us to practice listening carefully, as part of our topic of Sounds.

Making the most of the sunshine

We have had a great couple of weeks at Pre-School, making the most of the warm weather and sunshine.

We start the day with "Wake and Shake" to get us moving.

 

 

We have been over to the school hall to practice moving to music. We had to listen carefully to the instrument Mrs Walker was playing, and then choose the right movement for that sound.

 



We have had lots of opportunities to play outside with the construction toys and water table.

 

Fun with sounds

Our Majors children have been having lots of fun learning about sounds, which is their topic for this term.

They have been out on a listening walk, hearing birds, cars on the road, the hand dryer in the toilets, and water bubbling in the fish tank.

 

 

They have also been painting to music - listening carefully to the music and painting faster when the beat of the music speeds up, and slower when it slows down.

 



Welcome back to our blog!

We would like to welcome all our families back to Pre-School. We hope you had a lovely summer. Our Majors children have settled back into Pre-School really well and we had some new children starting in the Minors group this week.

Some of our Majors children are staying with us into the afternoon, and had their first packed lunches with us last week.

Tewkesbury's BIG Weekend!

We had an amazing time at Tewkesbury's BIG Weekend. Our Majors children took part in the walking parade through the town, dressed in costumes for our Disney theme. They looked wonderful and behaved incredibly well. They really did us proud and we have received some lovely comments from people who watched the parade, about how great they looked. Here are some pictures of them:

We also had a bottle tombola stall in the Town Hall gardens, which was very popular and sold out by 2.30pm, raising over £200. Thank you to all the parents who helped out on the stall.

On the Sunday, we entered a team into the Bell Boat races. Our heat was very close and our boat was nose to nose with the other team for most of the race. They just edged past us in the end and we were disappointed not to make it through to the final.

Thank you to everyone who supported us by being involved in the parade, stall or boat team. We are already looking forward to next year's Big Weekend!