Halloween & Phonics with Conkers!

Over the past couple of weeks, the preschool children have continued to enjoy participating in phonics sessions with Rebecca. Amelie and River particularly enjoyed matching the letters on the conkers to the letters on the paper. Amelie very quickly noticed the letter A, telling her friends, “That conker is A, A for Amelie” and then placed all of the letters on to the A part of paper. She then went on to recognising further letters from her name and attempted to sequence them in the correct order to spell out her name using the conkers. Margot challenged some of her friends, “Can you find the letter for your name?” She was praising with a little clap and well done when the children correctly found the first letter of their name. Some of the younger preschoolers are engaging with the phonics sessions too. Harry had seen some of his friends do some letter practice writing and eagerly asked, “Can I try that too?” And with great control, was able to form the letters to make out his name and was very proud of himself.

On the build up to Halloween, the children have been exploring various sensory and craft activities including pumpkin carving, making pumpkin pies in the mud kitchen and making their own spiders. Whilst some children painted some spiders, Joshua and Esmé concentrated very well to weave some pipe cleaners together with Esmé paying close attention to detail and made sure that she had counted 8 legs before she had finished her spider. Edward, Gabriel and Ellie couldn't wait to get their hands inside the pumpkin to pull the seeds out, Ellie laughing as her hands dug deeper, “Ewww, it feels weird!”. Edward got stuck in, filling up his bowl to make some pumpkin soup just like in the story that had been read at group time. The children have all been very excited about dressing up with a variety of characters coming in to nursery. There were witches, skeletons, Batman and a princess to name a few. The children couldn’t wait to show off their outfits to each other whilst Otto waited eagerly throughout the day, “Is it Halloween yet? It needs to be dark to be Halloween!”.