We started off the half-term thinking about traditional tales and focused on two in particular: The Three Little Pigs and The Billy Goats Gruff. This led the children to build their own houses and bridges using various different materials and also created the opportunity for lots of retelling of the stories both indoors and outdoors.
We marked World Book day in several ways. On the day itself the children and staff came to playgroup dressed as one of their favourite book characters. We had characters ranging from Peter Rabbit to Angelina Ballerina, several dragons, a couple of knights, princesses, a gruffalo, a lion, a tiger, a skeleton, and a couple of bears! One of the parents came in to share a story with the children and read it in Italian. A week later, we went to Henleaze library to have a look at their newly renovated children’s section and to choose some books to take back to playgroup. During our time at the library we shared lots of stories together.
Our Teddy Groups have also been having a go at telling their own stories using Tales Toolkit. This time they got to choose the objects and put them in pockets in a special apron. Each pocket had the word and symbol for character, setting, problem and solution. They had some very creative ideas! Our last Teddy group focused on telling stories through mark making. This time Helen chose the objects and linked it back to her telling of the Billy Goats Gruff when the troll was last seen being swirled away by the river. She said it was the story of ‘What the troll did next’ and deliberately chose objects that lent themselves to actions that encouraged mark making. Spirals for the swirling river, ‘x’s for x marks the spot on treasure island and zig-zags for the snappy crocodile.
Rain has featured once again in our outside play and, undeterred, the children have enjoyed splashing in puddles, pouring rain water down guttering, mixing the rain water with mud to create wonderful concoctions, and making the toy animals go for a swim. The worms and snails have definitely liked the wet weather and some of the children were very excited to discover a particularly long worm in our Forest School area. In the last week, in a rare moment of sunshine, the children were very helpful and enthusiastic in using soapy water to clean all our muddy play kitchen toys.
Inspired by some wonderful activities from the EYFS Ramadan Plan, we spent a week learning about Ramadan. We had several moon activities: making paper plate moons, eating Jaffa cakes to turn them into crescent moon shapes, and at forest school that week we had croissants. At story time we shared the Ladybird First Festivals book about Ramadan. We also found pictures of mosques and encouraged the children to build their own mosques out of bricks and thought about what kind acts we could do. One kind act that some of the children helped with was to renovate our bug hotel at Forest School.
The last few weeks were focused on preparing for our Springtime Eggstravaganza ‘concert’, featuring spring and egg related songs and some country dancing. We made invitations to deliver to our neighbours at Fallodon Court inviting them to the first performance and the children then performed the songs and dances again to their parents on the last day of term. During this time we also decorated paper eggs, made fork art chicks, and found out about the different ways that people celebrate Easter. The children also enjoyed little chick cakes that one of our lovely parents made for us. On our last day of term we had little hot cross buns as a snack and then the children had great fun going on their own egg hunt out in our forest school area.
As in previous years we have been joined at playgroup this term by our tadpoles from Gail’s pond. The children have loved watching them grow from frogspawn into tadpoles. We had so many this year that we were able to give some away to our neighbours for their ponds. The remaining tadpoles have gone back to Gail’s pond for the Easter holidays but they will return at the beginning of next term so that we can see them change into frogs and have our very own Fallodon Springwatch. Term begins again on Monday 15th April and we look forward to seeing children, and tadpoles, then. We hope you are having a lovely Easter break.
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