Winter Walks & Library Trip!

The preschoolers have had a lovely couple of weeks exploring the icy conditions in the nursery garden and around Imber Court grounds. In the garden, Rowan had discovered that there was lots of frost on the bark where the sun hadn’t quite thawed it out yet. He called his friends over after placing a few bits of the bark on to the table in the direct sun. When he got the attention of Luna and Chloe, they were all very amazed, watching the ice melt and then he suggested to them, “Why don’t we stay here and watch it, you can see the sun is making the ice melt!”. Luna watched for a moment and then pointed closer and showed her friends, “If you look even closer, it looks like a snowflake”. By this time, Florence had come over with enough magnifying glasses for them all and said, “Now we can see them even better and closer”.  They all stood there for a good few minutes just quietly watching as the sun melted the ice. Once these had all melted, there was quite a lot of children now gathered around to see what was happening and soon enough there were several preschool children placing the bark in the sunlight all around the garden and having a race as to whose ice would melt first.

The pre school children have also been very interested in lots of mark making activities in the literacy area. Alfie challenged himself to trace out every pattern with his finger and laughed when he got to the circles. When Madan looked at him, intrigued what he was laughing at, Alfie laughed again and said, “My finger is getting dizzy!”. They have also been focusing on the letter of the week, which this week was “B”. When tidying up in the garden, Sadie reminded her friends, “Remember we need to find all of the things with the letter B”. Tom ran straight over to a ball and called out, “I have a B for ball”, whilst Isaac collected some bats from the floor and said, “I have all of the bats”. Whilst putting some rubbish away, Ada excitedly showed her friends, “Look the bin is B too”.

A group of the preschool children visited the library this week where they had a small story and rhyme time with Jeremy who works there. They listened intently to the monkey puzzle story and Daniel was keen to tell Jeremy that he knew that Julia Donaldson wrote the story, before naming other Julia Donaldson story books including The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Tabby McTat. Isaac then challenged Daniel, “Do you know who the illustrator is?” Daniel said no which made Isaac chuckle and say, “No, me either”. They all then listened to some stories, joined in with a few nursery rhymes and learned a new one: ‘A sailor went to sea sea sea’ which was one of the favourites and sung the whole way back to nursery! Alfie couldn’t wait to sing it to his friends as soon as they returned. The children then had the opportunity to individually select a couple of story books to have a look through. Ada recognised a couple of the story books and pointed out whether either she has them at home or preschool has them. Amelie, Iris and Phoebe sat down together to share the same story whilst India loved flicking through all of the books, smiling at each one as she looked at the pictures.