A Funny Weather Week

It has been a bit of a strange weather week, one day cold and rainy and the next day lovely sunshine. I booked a much needed day off and actually chose the best day of the week to go on the hunt for small plants for our fairy garden. I was under a lot of pressure as Eirwen is a bit of a plant expert and had given me my instructions on what to get. I on the other hand am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination and so felt the pressure in getting it right for Eirwen and of course all the fairies. I think I did well as Eirwen was very smiley when she saw my floral treasure trove in the boot of my car. I had a lovely day off (even if part of it was actually classed as work) and spent the day going around garden centres with my son Beau. We had breakfast in one garden centre and afternoon tea in another and back to my sons house in Norwich for dinner. I even got to meet a T'Rex on my travels and managed to get his photo for Aiden and Henry our Dinosaur experts at pre-school.

The children were excited to see the plants I brought back and are now learning that not every petal has to be picked and that sometimes it is nice to leave them on the plants.

There have been a few children off with all manner of coughs, colds and earaches so we hope they are all better soon and back to pre-school this coming week.

We have welcomed our newbies Joscelyn, Eloise and Alexis to pre-school and they are settling really well and already making friends with everyone.

Our Mini-Beast theme is going to spill in to this coming week due to the weather we have just had and the lack of bugs!!. We might try and take some of the children out for a little walk armed with our bug pots to try and catch and encourage the bugs to move in to the bug houses.

There have been lots of challenging work going on in pre-school, especially for our Biggies that are going to start getting ready for their big day in September. I am off to meet a reception teacher in the next couple of weeks to discuss exactly what helps a teacher when our children begin reception class. I think to have this insight will help enormously with the smooth transition from pre-school life to primary school life and will benefit the children and hopefully their future teachers. Our Littlies are certainly beginning to demonstrate how ready they are to move up to the next group in September and some of them had a little taster session the other day. They behaved brilliantly and were not daunted by sitting with the biggies. We realise the importance of giving our older children and younger children time away from each other. The separate focus sessions enable the adults to support the ages and stages of learning within the two groups and as these groups are small in number each child gets their time to shine. Saying that however, we also greatly believe in the groups mixing during free-play and snack/lunch times. The older children act as good role-models and support the younger ones in becoming more confident and this in turn supports our younger ones to become more independent. It works for us, and the feedback we receive from our parents whose children have moved on up to reception class, have said that their children settled quickly and are enjoying school life.

We had a visitor yesterday from Suffolk Early Years and she gave Eirwen some great resources and advice on how to support early speech and language, in particular understanding speech and language. Eirwen and I will work with small groups of children during the week and will keep you updated on how this is going and how you can support this at home.

Well the sun is shining and the back garden needs a mow so I am off outside. I hope you all have a really enjoyable bank holiday weekend and we will see you all next week.

Lisa x