February Newsletter 2022

We have had a fantastic month with the children enjoying their learning opportunities and exploring the indoor and outdoor environments.

The children’s focus this month has been a story called First Day at Bug School. The children enjoyed being out in the nature garden and exploring the different environments to try and find a range of bugs. They have used magnifying glasses and binoculars to find them. The children have also been looking for a variety of birds from our bird tower, while joining in with the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch. Big Garden Birdwatch helps us monitor how garden birds are faring. Shockingly, we’ve lost 38 million birds from UK skies in the last 50 years, so it really is vital we do all we can to look after our birdlife.

Celebrations took place for Valentine’s Day, which were referred to as ‘love day’. The children created some beautiful salt dough tea light love hearts, to share with their family and friends.

Our Baby units have had lots of educational fun exploring the farm animals, using them within a variety of different sensory activities such as gloop, cereal and jelly. The outdoor environment has been enjoyed and the children have taken part in forest school sessions collecting mud and sticks and making mud pictures. They’ve also been learning about the weather such as, rain, wind, sun, and the sky while outdoors.

The babies also enjoyed looking at different building machinery and how they can build towers and structures using different material and textures.

Our Toddler units have enjoyed reading the book The Gruffalo and have re-told the story using puppets and pictures from the book. Great fun was had making Gruffalo crumble in our Little Chefs session, where the children learnt how to measure their ingredients and excitement was built as all the children had the chance to taste their crumble at snack time.

The Toddlers have also enjoyed the forest school collecting leaves and sticks to make their own pictures using the natural resources. Following on from this, our Toddler units have also been using different materials to build towers and structures. They have used different components to stick the blocks together to see which worked best.

Colour and animal recognition has also been an interest to our Toddler units and the children have been expressing themselves through animal creative play, using animal sounds and understanding the animal habitats. There has been lots of roaring like lions and hissing like snakes.

Our Pre-School units have been busy looking at literacy and letter of the month, where they have learnt how to distinguish capital and lower-case letters. The children have begun to write their names and used a variety of different mark making resources to practise copying letters and putting them in sequence to make small words such as cat and mat.

Maths has also been a focus, further extending the children’s understanding and knowledge of colours, shapes, and numbers. The children have enjoyed recognising shapes in their everyday environments and realising that shapes are all around us.

The children have explored the role play area dressing up as doctors and vets, using each other to practise bandages and looking at pictures of x rays. In the mark making area they have been making their own baker recipes and shopping lists. This led to conversation about what the children would like to be when they grow up.