We’re now into the last couple of months of our preschool year at Kempshott Under Fives – the year has flown by.

Over the last few weeks, and up until the end of the school year, we are putting lots of work into school readiness for our older children. Each day we are having fun with activities to promote number recognition, personal and social skills, listening and understanding, and health and self care to name a few.

We are currently learning all about lifecycles – we’ve had a delivery of caterpillars and we are watching them grow every day, patiently waiting for them to change into butterflies. We are watching them wiggle and eat and are keeping a diary of the changes we see. It’s very exciting and the children are looking forward to releasing butterflies into the garden. We also had a new tough tray delivered which we used to look at frogspawn. We will soon be looking at tadpoles and learning about the life cycle of a frog.

We had deaf awareness week in May and talked about how signing can help people communicate when they can’t hear or talk. We use Makaton as part of our learning at preschool and our children are taught new signs each week. To tie in with lifecycles we have been learning how to sign butterfly.

We’ve continued to spend lots of time outdoors. We’ve made obstacle courses together and the children created their own seesaw with a step and a wooden plank. We have seen so much teamwork, ideas, critical thinking, predicting, gross motor skills, core strength building and turn taking in our garden activities, which is just amazing.