Mon 5^th Sept - Fri 16^th December

Half Term: 24^th - 28^th October

Spring Term 2012

Wed 4^th Jan – Fri 30^th March

Half Term: 13^th - 17^th Feb

Mon 16^th April – Wed 18^th July

Half Term: 4^th – 11^th June

Committee drinks evening 8pm, Lions of Bledlow

Photographer coming to pre-school.

Pre-school committee meeting 8pm.

AGM 12 noon, Village Hall. Creche available!

Half term

Nativity Play

Xmas party End of term

This half term our theme is COLOURS. Each week we will choose a different colour and use it as a base to provide a variety of activities designed to cover aspects of the Foundation Stage Curriculum. A weekly timetable is posted on the board, which specifies each day’s activities, but here are some examples of the things we will be doing with your children at different levels depending on their stage of development:

All through the term we will be working on making our own colour book. We will ask children to find objects in that week’s colour around the room and take photos of them holding the objects. At the end we will collate them into our own book for the shelf. It helps children to understand and recognise colours and to co-operate to produce something for the pre-school. Later they love looking back over the photos of themselves and their friends. We will also make traffic lights, order red hearts by size, make apple trees, play with fire engines and cook jam tarts with extra strawberries. Children can co-operate to make a picture of a big red bus for the wall, with pictures of themselves in the windows. The main focus of the week however will be to make sure all the new children are happily settled and really excited about pre-school.

Using blue ribbons on sticks we will make big circles in the air (a pre-writing skill). We will make waves in the sea using blue paint and marbles and we will use Thomas the Tank Engine to introduce numerals. We will have plenty of water play and also play with blue balloons when we read our Big Blue Balloon story. We will cook some healthy blueberry muffins for our snack and make seaside pictures using real sand.

This week we will make five little duck pictures, encouraging the children to count the right number of ducklings and to subtract them when singing the song. Older children can add numbers to their ducks. We will make sunflowers using real seeds at the centre and cook cheesy baked potatoes. Children also enjoy making a sun using an old CD and some yellow

triangles and this helps with using and naming shapes.

This colour allows us to explore nature a bit – we will do leaf printing and plant some cress. We will make snakes in the grass, which involves scissor control and weaving, and we will make our own green paint using blue and yellow. We can learn about the life cycle of a frog and we will cook a green pasta salad.

When trying to think of something black and white we could cook we came up with marmite and/or cream cheese sandwiches! We will make chequered flags, encouraging children to recognise and recreate patterns and hopefully appealing to the young racing drivers amongst us! We will do night pictures, skeleton collages and penguins. We will also discuss and practise using zebra crossings and other road safety issues (there is a resource box we can borrow to help with this).

Autumn should be underway by now, so we can collect conkers and use them for counting and maths activities. We will have a worm hunt and make bear masks and snakes out of sticks. We will build a wall using real bricks and sand for cement. We will cook brown bread rolls and we’ll use red and yellow paint to make orange. We also plan to grind some wheat into flour using a pestle and mortar as well as looking into the "life cycle" of a loaf of bread. This helps children to really understand where the food comes from.

We’ll use this week to revise all the colours and make multi-coloured things. We can use dyed pasta to make snakes or necklaces using repeating patterns, and in past years children have really enjoyed spraying a white sheet with lots of colours of thin paint and watching them all spread and blend (it also strengthens their hands!). We’ll make a rainbow handprint frieze for the wall and we’ll weave colourful ribbons in and out of pea netting. On Friday we’ll learn about Diwali by making some pretty, colourful candle holders and greetings cards.