Celebrating books and story telling, learning about Ramadan and a Springtime Eggstravaganza!

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.

Mark making retelling the story of What the troll did next

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.

Delivering invitations

Our Springtime Eggstravaganza at Fallodon Court

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.

Exploring Shape, Winnie the Pooh Day and celebrating the Lunar New Year 2024

This term the children have been exploring shape. They have made wonderful pictures using our big foam shapes, created magnificent constructions using the magnatiles and made circular bird feeders. Some of our older ones have been on shape hunts to discover shapes in the environment. We have also had snacks with a shape theme – round crumpets, triangular flatbreads and square and flower shaped waffles.

The weather has also created lots of opportunities for play. On a particularly cold week we froze some of our animals in one of our tuff spots and the children had great fun using our hammers to smash the ice to release them. We have also had lots of rain this term and the children have enjoyed splashing in some very big puddles and using the rain water to make their own versions of tea, coffee and soups!

18th January was Winnie the Pooh day. To celebrate the occasion the children were invited to bring in their own soft toy for a Teddy Bears picnic. The soft toys also joined in with our singing and action rhymes. Some children helped to create a big map of One Hundred Acre Wood and at Forest School that week we created our own version of One Hundred Acre Wood using the branches from Flora and Kizzy’s old Christmas trees.

Playing in One Hundred Acre Wood

This half-term has been the turn of our younger pre-schoolers to participate in Teddy Group and they have been doing activities to support and develop fine motor skills and to support number recognition.

We celebrated the Lunar New Year in our last week of term and we were incredibly lucky to have one of our parents come in with lots of lovely lunar new year resources for the children to have, including chocolate money and fortune cookies. She also read them The Great Race story which is all about how the years came to be named after animals and taught us all to say Happy New Year in Vietnamese! We also had our very own noodle cafe one morning for snack time and the children enjoyed playing Chinese restaurants using wool noodles and oats. We decorated the room with Chinese lanterns and Kizzy taught the children how to do a lion dance.

We have had quite a few two year olds start this term and all the staff have been impressed with how well they have settled in and how our older children have looked after them and included them in their play.

Our final Forest School of the term was a very muddy affair! Most of the children got well and truly stuck in to the mud experience – we had mud castles and even mud hand washing. We also had lots of spotting of worms and snails! Those who weren’t so into the mud experience helped Helen dismantle One Hundred Acre Wood and create a pretend bonfire.

We hope that you are enjoying your half-term break and look forward to welcoming you back on Monday 19th February.

Celebrations, thinking of others and beautiful rainbows!

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.

Spotty Children in Need cakes

Parent/carers lunch

Sorting out items for the food bank

Fallodon Court Christmas performance!

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.

Celebrating Autumn, travelling to the moon and some very large pumpkins!

We’ve had another busy half-term welcoming back our returning Fallodon play groupers and getting to know our new children and their families. One of our focuses this term has been thinking about kindness, inspired by the book A, B, C’s of Kindness. We’ve also been reminding the children about our Golden Rules; Kind words, kind hands and feet and kind to the environment. One of the ways that we like to look after our environment at this time of the year is by re-planting our planters. The children are always very enthusiastic helpers with this!

At playgroup we like to learn about the festivals that our children celebrate in their own homes and this term one of our families introduced us to the Mid-Autumn festival that is celebrated in Vietnamese and Chinese culture. In Vietnamese the festival is called ‘Tet trung thu’ and is celebrated at the end of the mid-Autumn festival when the moon is at its fullest and shines the brightest. To celebrate the festival the children worked together to make the brightest, shiniest moon. At snack time the children tried Chinese pear and red pomelo and at the end of the morning Trang came in to read us a story about celebrating the moon and show us the lovely paper lanterns they use as decorations. Thanks Trang for the lovely snacks, lanterns and teaching us about such a wonderful festival!

The children became very interested in the moon and we followed this interest by singing one of our favourite songs – ‘Zoom, zoom, zoom’ and having a week focused on the story ‘Whatever Next’ where a teddy bear makes himself a rocket and flies to the moon. Once the children became familiar with this story they became very adept at telling the story to themselves and each other and also had a go at making their own cardboard rockets to get to the moon.

Autumn always provides us with an abundance of resources to play with and we have been encouraging the children to bring in what they have collected when going out and about with their families. Wendy brought in some apples from her garden for the children to make printed pictures with. She also used some of them to make stewed apple to have one snack time. Conkers have proved to be especially popular – we have made conker rolling pictures with them, balanced them on top of wooden bricks, rolling them down guttering and had great fun transporting them about in our large vehicles.

We have also been given two very large pumpkins and this inspired the children to create their very own pumpkin pictures. We had pumpkin houses, cars, mountains and snakes. Next term we will be hammering golf tees into these pumpkins during our Forest School sessions.

With many new children starting Forest School our main focus this term has been getting the children used to our Forest School rules and exploring the Forest School environment. The mud kitchen and potion making has been especially popular and the children have really enjoyed helping themselves to water from our new water container.

This term the staff are undertaking Tales Toolkit training. Tales toolkit is a resource where the children lead the story telling using bags with easily recognisable symbols for character, setting, problem and solution. Our aim is to use Tales toolkit with the children once a week. If you would like to find out a little bit more about what Tales toolkit is and the benefits to the children please click on the following link https://talestoolkit.com/#home-section-one

We had our first Parents lunch of the term at the end of September. This is a great way for our Fallodon families to get to know each other whilst munching on their lunch. Our next Parents Lunch will be on Thursday 16th November, 12.15-1pm. Make sure you have this date in your diary!

We hope you are enjoying the half-term break and look forward to welcoming everyone back on Monday 30th October.

Bugs, a visit to Fallodon Park and keeping cool!

We decided to mark 30 Days Wild in June by having a focus on bugs. The children used corks to create the body of the hungry caterpillar, explored symmetry by making butterfly prints, practised their threading skills by creating spiders out of pipe cleaners and cardboard tubes and developed their numeracy skills by counting out the spots on their ladybirds. The children also had great fun making their own bugs out of play dough.

We continued our bug theme outside as the children looked under logs and in hedges for snails, worms and caterpillars. At Forest School they practised their hammering skills by hammering nails into a log and then winding wool around the nails to create an intricate spiders web.

We are lucky that we are so close to Fallodon Park and often our families meet up there after playgroup. However we thought it would be really good to schedule in a visit during a playgroup session to give all the children an opportunity to explore, play and climb on all the different play equipment. Great fun was had by all!

It feels a bit strange writing this on a rainy July morning but one of our main preoccupations during June was how to keep the children and ourselves cool and so water play featured quite heavily in a lot of our plans! And we all really appreciated the shade in our Forest School area. The prolonged dry spell also meant that we could have our loose parts outside on a regular basis and the children became very adept at making their own creations.

What would a hot sunny day be like without a nice cooling ice lolly too? Gail made us all special summer fruits ice lollies to have at Forest School to keep cool.

On the longest day of the the year, also known as national Giraffe day, we had a ‘Bring your teddy to playgroup’ fundraiser for local children’s charity Crackerjack. As you can see from the photos all the teddies and soft toys had lots of fun joining in with many playgroup activities and meeting each other. It was a very busy morning as the children even had time to make their own tall giraffes to mark the national day!

Our last few weeks of term were spent playing with large boxes, talking about our summer holidays, finding out about our preschoolers’ visits to their new schools and enjoying spending time with each other. This culminated in awarding our leavers their Fallodon Playgroup leaving certificates on the last day of term.

Great fun was had flying our paper aeroplanes

The day after playgroup officially finished we had our annual Fallodon families picnic. It was lovely to see so many of our families attend.

Finally, thank you for all the lovely gifts, fantastic cards and wonderful words that we have received. As I say every year, it really is a privilege to look after your children and watch them grow and develop. We all really love what we do!

Good luck to everyone who is moving on to school or new adventures and we look forward to welcoming our returning children back on Monday 4th September.

Coronation celebrations, a visit from a real life vet and lots of pretend pets.

No sooner than we were back at playgroup preparations started in earnest for our Coronation celebration with our neighbours at Fallodon Court. The children made lovely red, white and blue bunting invitations and a small group went and posted them. We even bumped into Carol who was on her way to another coronation party and kindly modelled the crown that she had with her!

In honour of the coronation we planted a new tree in our Forest School area, Tom, one of our parents who is a gardener, helped with the digging and another parent, Suzi, decorated wooden figures of King Charles and Queen Camilla for the children to play with.

To create our very own ‘street party’ feel the children helped to make bunting which we hung up outside and we then put lots of tables outside for our visitors to sit at whilst having their drink and cake – luckily we were blessed with lovely sunny weather. After we had eaten our snack the children entertained our visitors by singing some coronation inspired songs including ‘Old King Charles’, ‘The Wheels on the carriage’ and ‘Sing a song of sixpence’. It was truly a wonderful experience and lovely to see young and old sitting together, talking and playing with one another.

Aside from Coronation celebrations our main focus this half-term has been vets and pets, culminating in a visit from one of our parents, Briony, who is a real life vet. The children have had great fun making their own pretend pets as well as ‘making better’ the large variety of soft toy animals that we have at playgroup, some children even pretended to be the pets themselves! We’ve created paper plate cats, sparkly fish, hand print bunnies and a forest school favourite – log dogs!

The children have loved having the tadpoles at playgroup and have patiently been waiting for them to grow into frogs. Their patience was rewarded when on the last week of term Gail found a frog! In honour of this the children made their own bouncy legged frogs. Gail has now taken the frog and remaining tadpoles to go and live back in her pond.

In Teddy Group with our pre-schoolers this half-term we have been focusing on practising our fine motor skills and consolidating our number recognition up to and beyond 6.

Late spring has very much influenced our Forest school activities this term. At the beginning of May the children made their very own clay ‘Green people’ to celebrate May Day and we have used the flowers around us to make some yummy snacks – dandelion pancakes and elderflower pancakes. This then inspired the children to make their own ‘yummy’ soups, stews and potions!

We hope all our families enjoy the sunny weather this half-term and thought that you might like to see the creative endeavours of the staff at our craft social last week to mark the end of another wonderful term.

Playgroup begins again on Monday 5th June – we look forward to seeing you then.

World Book Day, the return of Snow School and celebrating Spring.

Although it’s been a short half-term we have packed lots into a few weeks at playgroup.

Our first few weeks were focused on The Gruffalo and the children enjoyed making roasted fox biscuits, creating a large collage of the gruffalo and eating gruffalo crumble with owl ice-cream!

For World Book Day the children were encouraged to come to playgroup dressed as a story book character and to bring in one of their favourite books to share. We were also treated to listening to an audio version of The Gruffalo whilst the children ate a bit more ‘owl’ ice-cream at snack time.

As part of our World Book Day celebrations we also had a visit to Max Minerva’s bookshop on Henleaze Road and the children enjoyed listening to several stories and our four year olds helped to buy some books for playgroup with our World Book Day tokens.

The children (and staff) were very excited to finally see some snow at playgroup. For many of our children this was their first experience of it. We had great fun building snow people, throwing snow balls and pulling each other around on our playgroup sledges (yes, we really do have playgroup sledges that we we keep in our shed on the off chance that we may get snow!).

Continuing with our Gruffalo theme, Helen read the children The Gruffalo’s Child as this story is set in the snow and, as in the story, we looked for different tracks and marks that had been made in the snow. Once back inside the children warmed up with hot chocolate and made cotton wool snow people.

Although it had stopped snowing for Thursday Forest school there was enough snow left on the ground for the children to enjoy ‘Snow School’. The children collected snow in buckets and trucks and transported it about and many mixed the snow with mud to make their own ‘delicious’ treats including ‘ice cakes’ which were offered to everyone.

The children made lovely flower cards and created beautiful posies to give to their Mums for Mothering Sunday. It was truly delightful to see the looks of joy when the children proudly presented their flowers to their Mums.

It is always lovely to welcome parents into playgroup to share stories and their family traditions. In honour of Dan coming in we had Welsh Cakes at Forest School, he read the children a story about a Dragon and taught us the Welsh for Good Morning – Bore Da, and for Good Night – Nos Da.

Although outside it still felt like winter with all the rain, inside the hut we were determined to celebrate Spring and Easter. The children decorated Easter egg invitations to post to our neighbours at Fallodon Court inviting them to come along and watch the children perform their Spring Songs and Dance. When we planned this we had envisaged a sunny spring morning, the reality was that it was cold and rainy. However, despite this the children performed brilliantly, especially ‘In and out the dusty bluebells’, which had taken a few weeks of rehearsing and it brought a smile to the faces of our neighbours that had braved the weather to watch us. Later in the week the children performed the same songs and dances to their families – this time we decided to stay inside and keep dry.

The children created their own fork art Easter chick cards to give to their families, decorated paper eggs and made chocolate nests to take home to eat. At Forest School we toasted hot cross buns over the fire.

As a special Easter treat Tara, a playgroup Mum, made and decorated beautiful Easter bunny biscuits for the children to eat at snack time.

We hope that you are having a lovely Easter break and enjoying the sunshine that has finally arrived. We look forward to welcoming you back to playgroup on Monday 17th April.

Celebrating the Year of the Rabbit, joining in with the Big Garden Birdwatch and lots of interesting constructions.

Although a short half-term we have packed a lot in at playgroup. At the beginning of term children were encouraged to bring in interesting shaped boxes from home and these were then used to make their own models – many of the children chose to make a home for one of the Three Little Pigs to live in as this was the traditional story that we were focusing on.

We celebrated the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Rabbit by making rabbit bookmarks, decorating rabbit shaped biscuits, role-playing our own Chinese restaurant, creating Chinese dragons and the return of the ever popular noodle cafe.

At the end of January we joined in with the Big Garden Birdwatch by making bird feeders to hang out in our forest school area and some of our older children created a tally chart to record the number of birds they had seen.

The weather has provided opportunities for exploring, learning and having fun. We had one very wet forest school where the children and staff had great fun collecting rainwater from the scout hut guttering and then pouring it down on our own pieces of guttering. Some children poured so much water down that it produced a really big and satisfying splash at the bottom!

We have also had some very cold weather which even froze the water in our bathroom pipes! The children had great fun gathering up the pieces of ice they found on top of our play boat and in our tyres and trying to look through it and then either smashing it with toy hammers or sliding it down the guttering.

The remainder of term we have been focusing on shape and this has led to shape printing and lots and lots of interesting construction with our wooden blocks and magnatiles. We have also been practising our fine motor skills by threading small beads onto pipe cleaners, large beads onto laces and picking up pom poms with tweezers or fingers.

Fallodon Playgroup’s castle

At lunch club the children have really enjoyed creating big pictures together.

At Forest School we have been lucky enough to have a couple of fires and so have fried banana fritters and toasted bread over fire.

To mark Winnie the Pooh day on January 18th the children helped Wendy to saw branches off Helen and Wendy’s old Christmas trees and then stuck them in the ground to create our own version of One Hundred Acre Wood for our forest school animals to play in. Inside the children also decorated a large tree for Owl and his friends to live in.

On our last Wednesday of term we have the second of our Parent Lunches. It was lovely to spend time with our Fallodon families and get to know parents, grandparents and siblings a little bit more.

On our last Forest School of term we also saw the first signs that Spring is coming.

We hope that you are all having a lovely half-term and enjoying a bit of that Spring sunshine we’ve had over the last few days and look forward to welcoming the play groupers back on Monday 20th February.

Teddy Group

Helping to tidy up

Making muffin pizzas

Practising our dog moves for our moving minute