It's hard to believe that we’re now into our final term at Kempshott Under Fives.

At the end of our spring term the children created some amazing arts and crafts during our Easter week – they made cards, Easter bonnets and they made Easter nest cakes and decorated them with little eggs. They also created amazing footprint carrot pictures, which the children found very tickly on their toes and we did an Easter egg and carrot hunt in the garden. We even had a special visit from the Easter bunny who arrived with lots of chocolate eggs.

One of our spring themes has been baby animals. This prompted lots of conversations about different pets, so we surprised the children with a visit from Coco the French bulldog. They loved having Coco to visit and took turns to walk her on the lead.

This term we will continue to look at baby animals, the environment and life cycles. We’ll be following the life cycles of frogs, caterpillars and chicks and we’ll hopefully spot some butterflies in the garden. We are also busy gardening and planting lots of seeds.

The most exciting news to start the new term has been finding out which schools our older children are going to in September. It’s been lovely to hear all about the “big” schools and who is going where. So this term is when our “school readiness’ begins. We will begin to introduce lots of activities to prepare our bigger children for school; for example, can the children change into their PE kit by themselves? Can they independently wash their hands and open the food in their lunchbox? We’ll also start focus much more on numbers, health and self-care and communication and language.

School readiness is described in the foundation stage as “Children reaching a good level of development in the prime areas and literacy and mathematics”.

Some of the expected characteristics that should be displayed by a child to show school readiness;

• Independent in toileting
• Able to dress themselves
• Understands expected levels of behaviour
• Confidence and self-esteem
• Can take turns and share
• Can sit still for a short period
• Can separate from parents/carers
• Communication and language skills needed to communicate needs and listen to others
• Can actively learn and creatively and critically think

Some of these characteristics may of course be difficult for all children to achieve and this shouldn’t leave parents or practitioners concerned that a child isn’t school ready.