March has been a great month at Kempshott Under Fives - we have welcomed all of our children back to preschool and it’s so lovely to see everyone back together again.

It's been a busy few weeks – the children made beautiful Mothers Day cards and have been very creative with their Easter decorations. We also celebrated Holi Hindu, an ancient Hindu festival to welcome the arrival of spring and celebrate the end of winter. It’s also known as the festival of colour so the children had a great time paint and powder splatting as part of our celebrations. Another of our painting projects has been watching daffodils wake up and bloom and painting them each day until they are in full flower. The children also asked to plant our own daffodils so that we can watch them grow, so we are now enjoying watching them shoot in the garden.

It’s been a good month for dressing up – we enjoyed a superheroes week where the children dressed up as lots of wonderful characters and then we celebrated more superheroes, in the form of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. During first aid week the children were very attentive with checking temperatures, wrapping bandages, applying cold compresses and administering plasters. They also listened to each other’s heartbeat through a stethoscope, which was great fun. The role-play area was transformed into a surgery and the children made medicine, took phone calls, made appointments and filled out accident forms.

As part of our health care week, we took part in a very thoughtful community project of decorating love hearts for the NHS. One love heart is given to the patient and the other is given to their family - although they can’t visit in these times, the hearts which our children decorated are a constant reminder to the patients and families of how much they are loved and missed.

Our small group work this month has been focussed on maths and phonics. We have been identifying numerals, looking at simple adding and subtracting and learning to read number sentences. In our small group phonics work we have been listening to the initial sound in a word and matching it to a letter.

Our older children will be learning which primary school they are going to over the Easter holidays, so we are eagerly awaiting to hear the big news when we get back to preschool after the holidays. Next term we begin our preparations for the transition to big school. We will start by giving the children lots of mark making opportunities and activities that strengthen little hands for handwriting.