Cirencester Autumn Newsletter 2016

Transcription

1 Cirencester Autumn Newsletter 2016 Baby room This term our babies at Cirencester have been very busy with autumn walks, collecting leaves, fir cones and Autumnal bits for sticking and exploring with. They have also been painting pine cones and using them to print onto paper. They continue to get messy with mushy peas, gloop, dough, cereal, herbs and spices, dissolved jelly, pasta and rice with food colouring and squirty cream, a lovely mix of textures, smells and experiences to excite their senses. Their role play beach in the garden area has now gone away to make room for exploring trays, bikes and dens ready for the autumn. Lots of cooking activities including marmite swirls, pizzas, fruit smoothies to name a few! And of course time spent getting to know all of our new friends who have joined us throughout September. The baby room staff held a great parent workshop this month, the workshop was based on Schema s, this was to help parents to understand Schema s, the importance of how to encourage and plan for Schemas and the different styles of learning and how we can use this to turn negative behaviour into a positive.

2 Toddler room This term our toddlers have been busy charging around the garden, they now have a new sensory area with chalk boards, plants, wind chimes and bird feeders in to try and attract birds to the garden. The sunflowers have grown taller than our children!!! We have some new visitors in the form of Topsy and Tim, our nursery guinea pigs, who have been moved down to the toddler garden for the toddlers to look after for the term, we re all very excited! The toddlers have enjoyed lots of physical activities, climbing, exploring, taking risks in play and discovering how and when we are safe on obstacles and equipment with close supervision nearby.. just in case! This has created confident and excitable toddlers who are not afraid to give things a go and who happily run, jump, climb and create their own obstacles to play on, under, over, in and out of. The routine in our toddler room has now changed to incorporate the five to thrive ideas (parent workshop will be held in November, please see dates at end of the newsletter for more details), key workers now take their own key groups of children off into different areas throughout the morning to do different activities with their groups. This helps to support the development of their key children and making sure that planning is focussed on the ideas from the children and focussed around their own interests. They too have been on autumn walks and using the items they have collected for crafts in the rooms, as well as thinking about who they are and where they come from, learning about different roles, occupations and what jobs we all do. Toddlers are always so busy and the team have created small world play stations from old cable drums, the children have been on rocket adventures and getting stuck in with various cooking activities, yum, yum!

3 Preschool room In our Preschool room we have also been out and about on autumn walks and nature trails to find natural objects for our displays and items to put into our exploring trays. We have started to practice our nativity songs ready for our Christmas Nativity on Thursday 22 nd December. We visited the allotments and brought back some of our vegetables to cut up and explore! We have another visit planned soon, so that we can collect our pumpkins that have grown really well! We also learned about the life cycle of a butterfly and to our amazement we managed to hatch a moth that then flew around the classroom and kept hiding in our windows!! A very busy start to the term including cooking, P.E, science, gardening and drama! We even made our own face puzzles from photos and lolly sticks! The preschool staff have been very busy preparing to run another parent workshop, we will be running a phonics workshop in November, please see dates at the end of this newsletter for more details.

4 Preschool extra-curricular activities Every week the preschool children take part in extra activities planned for the children, this is to encourage the children learn and discover in a range of different subjects, here are a few of the things we have been doing this term: Gardening club: Making hedgehogs, learning about hibernation, planting tomatoes, green beans, printing trees for our helpful tree, leaf printing, and role playing in our mud kitchen! Science: Colour mixing, making squidgy stress balloons to help children sit in circle times and concentrate, creating air experiments that blew up balloons and made fizzy pop explode! Drama: Story CD s, using hands to imitate actions or signals, going on a bear hunt, and finding the Gruffalo! PE: Catching and throwing, obstacle courses, team games, working together to achieve a goal, and balance bike training. Cooking: Making hedgehog bun bread rolls, tasty fruit pastries, fruit smoothies, and tasting a variety of cereals

5 Nursery news As always we are continuing on our Bristol Standards journey, with new priorities for improvement so keep your eyes peeled for more changes that we hope will continue to improve our services here at Tiggers. Parent / carer workshop Phonics workshop will be held on Thursday 3 rd November Booking forms are now available in the preschool room, if you would like to learn more about how we teach the children and the formation of letters and their sounds then this is the workshop for you! The staff will teach you about the sounds and how to correctly say them, how this will help your child to go on and read and write and what not to do in terms of teaching. To book a space please collect and return a form from preschool now. Photographs The nursery photographer is booked in for Friday 28 th October They will be with us for the majority of the day, appointments will be available for children who do not usually attend a Friday, please bring your child in between 12pm-2pm, if you wish for your child to have their photograph taken. All other children who attend on the day will have their photographs taken unless staff are informed otherwise. The proof cards normally take around two weeks to come back and from there you can choose to purchase the photographs, which will be back in plenty of time before Christmas! Children in Need We will be planning a week filled with fundraising activities for your children to take part in during the week of 14 th 18 th November. After the success of our Queens tea party we have decided to have a Children In Need themed afternoon of fun, games, tea and cakes on the Friday afternoon, we would love to invite you along and will send out more information about this nearer the time. Fireworks Cirencester Round Table Firework Night is being held on Saturday 5 th November and we are one of their main sponsors. We will be there on the night to support the charity and will be handing out Lolli pops and homemade biscuits, as well as offering free face painting! Before the day we will be selling tickets (I will let you know when these are available) and Deirdre the Dragon who lights the bonfire every year will be coming to stay with us the week before. Christmas events Parents Christmas social evening will be held on Friday 2 nd December, we hope lots of you will be able to join us for an evening of drinks, nibbles and fun games, please note that this event is not for children to attend as it is to encourage parents to meet and

6 socialise with other parents and staff without having to focus on the little ones. Look out for invites soon! Parents evening for learning journeys and reports to be held on Thursday 15 th December. Children s Christmas parties for preschool and toddlers will be held on Monday 19 th December from pm (Babies will party all week as it is too much for the babies to all be in together) Preschool children s nativity Thursday 22 nd December Invite only event (preschool families) We are then closed for Christmas from 6pm on 23 rd December and will re-open on Tuesday 3 rd January We have also been busy creating Christmas card surprises for you to buy, but all of the details for these will be available once the proof cards have come back to us. Please note that I am currently phasing out the old Tiggers@live.co.uk and would like to advise that going forwards you use the Tiggers.cirencester@gmail.com , as this is the one that is checked frequently and used on a daily, so if your message is important this is the best to use and eventually the old one will be deleted, many thanks! Please take the time to look at our website at as this will contain all the latest information regarding health and sickness exclusion periods. If you have any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to contact us! Have a great term, From your Tiggerific Tiggers Team!