This term the birthday fairy has been very busy and we have celebrated lots of birthdays, starting with Helen’s 50th on the first day back! Former Fallodon Mum, Lisa, made a delicious 50th birthday cake for all of Fallodon Playgroup to enjoy – it was very yummy! Snack times this term have been really interesting as the birthday children have brought in lovely treats to share with all their friends including a beautiful fruit platter.
This half-term lends itself to activities based on traditions and festivals that the children celebrate with their own families and communities, including Halloween, Bonfire night and Divali, in addition to all the Christmas preparations. The children have printed spooky spiders, hammered golf-tees into pumpkins at Forest School, made gingerbread pumpkin biscuits, created very glittery sparkly fireworks pictures and made their own diva lamps out of clay.
We have also started Teddy Group this half-term with our eldest pre-schoolers. Our main focus has been on developing hand and finger strength an important prewriting skill but also a means of helping children develop independent self-card skills like doing up buttons, zips and poppers and putting on shoes. Our Teddy Groupers have enjoyed participating in play dough disco, picking up pom-pom with tweezers and using our ‘pinchy fingers’ to pick up the wooden prickles in the hedgehog game. We then introduced the children to our maths resource – Numicon. A numicon set represents the numbers 1 through to 10 as plastic coloured shapes that can be put on a board . To get the children used to the number each plastic shape represents, they placed pom-poms in each of the holes.
There has been a lot of rain this half-term, but that hasn’t dampened the children’s enthusiasm for playing outside and have enjoyed the large splash puddles that the rain has created. We have also loved seeing the beautiful rainbows that have been created when the sun decided to peep out from behind the clouds.
In the lead up to Christmas we have been thinking about other people and how we can help them through small acts of kindness. We had a fund raising spotty day for Children in Need which we combined with our termly parents lunch. Throughout November Fallodon families collected items for Bristol North West Food Bank in our annual reverse advent calendar. Our families were very generous and the children were very helpful in sorting out all the donated items. As in previous years we decided to invite our neighbours at Fallodon Court to a Christmas singalong. Firstly the children had to make the invitations and then some of our preschoolers went to post them through the doors. We then had a few weeks to practise all our songs before our performance on the last Wednesday of term. This time we had a record number of residents braving the cold weather to watch the children and join in with favourite Christmas songs. It was a truly joyous occasion.
In addition to thinking of others, the last few weeks have been about enjoying the build up to Christmas. The children made a Christmas tree advent calendar and then in December took turns to remove the numbered baubles to reveal a picture – there were lots of robins! They made sparkly tree decorations, adorable reindeer cards, made mini rosemary Christmas trees at Forest School and learned lots of Christmas songs. Even the staff got in on all this creativity and enjoyed an evening making Christmas wreaths with another former Fallodon Mum, Imogen. Our term concluded with our annual Christmas party; the children joined in with dancing, riding on our ‘reindeers and sleigh’ and playing pass the parcel. At the end of the morning they performed their Christmas songs to their families and everyone got into the festive spirit by joining in with the children.
Thank you to all our Fallodon families for the lovely cards and presents that you have given us, as I say every year we really do enjoy what we do and regard it as a real privilege to look after your children and watch and support them as they grow. Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and we look forward to welcoming you back on Wednesday 3rd January.
fallodonwayplaygroup.wordpress.com 