What we’ve been up to this month…

In January we have been looking into “Winter Wonders” exploring all things magical this season from the importance of staying safe and warm in the cold weather to ice play. We have celebrated the new year creating our own coloured sand and glitter fireworks and engaged in circle time talking about how we celebrated with our families.

We have made arctic playdough engaging in small world play using polar bears, igloos, arctic hares and penguins. We have created handprint polar bears, explored arctic animal footprints in gloop, engaged in ice play, Duplo brick printing to create our own Igloos, explored scissor control creating snowflakes, paper plate polar bears & much more.

What’s happening next month…

In February we will be looking at the theme of Friendship and feelings. This will allow us to look at the different relationships we have in our lives and talk about our families.

We will continue to explore the importance of sharing and turn taking with each other through different circle times and orchard games- this is a fun way to bring turn taking into play!

We will also be looking at Chinese new year and Ramadan exploring what this means and how others celebrate all around the world. We will be doing food tasting, arts and crafts, circle time and our pre-schoolers will be deep diving into this celebration further during their pre-school sessions.

We have been exploring rhyming sounds with the pre-schoolers throughout stories and orchard games- they have done so well with this and have demonstrated their understanding noticing different rhymes within play!

Activities we will do at nursery:

• Friendship trees
• Self portraits
• Handprint hearts
• Exploring our emotions through roleplay- happy, sad, excited etc.
• Engaging in kindness challenges- looking after our friends
• Emotion cards
• Turn taking on our new obstacle course
• Colour monster playdough
• Friendship story sessions
• Friendship Yoga

February’s Preschool focus:

Exploring world celebrations, how we celebrate others and linking this to Chinese new year and Ramadan.

Some ideas to do at home:

• Send photos of our families into the ILD for circle time
• Conversations about kind gestures we can do for our family and friends
• Exploring facial expressions using our reflections in the mirror
• Creating ourselves using playdough
• Handprint painting with our family
• Bake our friends and family out of gingerbread people – LINK HERE
• Head to the beach with our friends and family for a walk