December 2023 - Happy Christmas!

We finished off 2023 with a lovely Christmassy month at Kempshott Under Fives. The children decorated our tree, did lots of Christmas craft and sang lots of Christmas songs!

We had a sing around the Christmas tree in church, which was lovely. And of course there is always cooking for Christmas so we baked gingerbread stars to share at our singing around the tree afternoon. The children weighed the ingredients, squeezed out the syprup and made all of the gingerbread dough.

The last day of term was a Christmas party for all of the children – complete with a visit from Father Christmas.

After the break we are looking forward to the new year at preschool when all the children excitedly talk about their holidays and what presents they got for Christmas. Every January we see children recreating some of their favourite Christmas memories through their play, such as Christmas cake making, laying the tables for dinners with family, and wrapping presents, just like Mummy does! This links perfectly to the Department for Education's "Early Year's Outcomes" which says that a typical child should be able to "remember and talk about significant events in their own experiences" and "recognise and describe special times or events for family or friends".

Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year!

November 2023

It’s full steam ahead to Christmas at Kempshott Under Fives and preschool is full of glitter, sparkles and singing. We have had lots of Christmas crafts, tree decorating and singing and we are on the very exciting countdown to our Christmas party where we will have fun and games before Santa joins us for a Christmas sing-a-long.  

November was full of fun and colour – we started off with fireworks and used lots of colour and textures to create some wonderful firework and bonfire pictures. We then made breadstick sparklers, dipped in chocolate and sprinkles, before experimenting with some real sparklers, following our rules of keeping safe with fireworks. Bonfire night linked perfectly with our nature study, which focused on fire.

For Remembrance Day we did some “process art” to create poppies and created pictures on our light box. We talked about wearing poppies to remember the soldiers who helped our country and the children joined in with a two-minute silence and did an incredible job!

It was Children in Need in November and the children and staff were invited to dress up in their pyjamas, the children thought it was great fun to come to preschool in their pyjamas.

Our children love the garden – so in between the rain we have been outside jumping in huge puddles and we are also busy collecting all the fallen leaves for our next nature study theme.

We are of course continuing with our small group work every week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; Science experiments and our cooking sessions when we make or bake treats each week. This month the baking table has been full of yummy Christmas goodies!

October 2023, our first half term.

We have introduced a weekly nature study this year at Kempshott Under Fives. It has been a fantastic addition and the children are thoroughly enjoying it. We have followed some lovely nature themes over the last month including owls, hedgehogs and sticks. The children crafted some very impressive owls and we read the story of the Baby Owl. Following the stormy weather our nature theme moved on to sticks and we managed to collect lots of sticks that had blown down from the trees. We created a campfire, and of course we sat around our campfire with hot chocolate and marshmallows, and we read one of our favourite stories – Stickman.

We have also followed a hedgehog theme and looked at hibernation, made hedgehog bread rolls and the children made some hedgehog beds too.

With the arrival of autumn, we have been enjoying nature walks with the pull along cart to collect natural resources to use in preschool, such as pine cones, conkers and leaves – all great for our craft projects.

Our Halloween week was a chance to get creative with pumpkins and the children dressed up in Halloween colours all week too.

Alongside our regular activities of reading and story time, dough gym, write dance, makaton signing and cooking, we have also enjoyed some lovely group activities. We have been using tapping sticks to develop our rhythm skills and we have been playing games with material and light up balls, which are good exercises to get our muscles ready for writing.

We had our Ofsted inspection visit in September. Our staff did exceptionally well and our parents made some wonderful contributions to the inspector. Thank you to all involved and we look forward to sharing our result in due course.  

September 2023 - a new academic year!

Welcome to our new academic year at Kempshott Under Fives! The first few weeks at preschool are always about settling in and helping our children make new friends and get to know staff. The children have settled amazingly well and we have lots of happy faces every day.

We have been treated to some lovely weather for our first few weeks at preschool so we have been using our outdoor learning environment as much as possible and we have some great activities planned for extending our children’s learning outdoors. We’ll also be learning about autumn this term and exploring colours, outdoor sounds and hibernating animals.

This year, Kempshott Under Fives will be taking part in the 'Wanderlust Nature Study Programme'.  Our staff are being fully trained and our learning will centre around different aspects of nature, week by week, in line with the seasons. We have started the term with Summer and have introduced summer herbs into our weekly activities. The children have been using scissors to cut the parsley and thyme from the garden, and have added our herbs to our water play and woodland kitchen. We froze flowers and herbs into ice cube trays for sensory play and we practiced using a pestle and mortar to crush our herbs and make pastes and potions. We have also been focusing on 'Sunshine and Shadows' as the sunny weather continues.

At Kempshott Under Fives we work with ‘in the moment’ planning. This involves us seizing the moments when children show interest and curiosity in something by immediately supporting their next steps.  We watch what our little ones are doing in the moment, we can then link it with their interests and help move their learning on. For example, if we can see the children are talking about classrooms and school, we would seize this opportunity to extend their interest in school life by changing our role-play area into a school. Staff can engage with children by following and supporting their interest and extend their learning experience.  One activity might be mark making in a register – this can encourage a child who is not usually interested in putting pencil to paper to engage with these activities when their interests are extended ‘in the moment’.

Keeping with our planning in the moment, and following the interests of the children, we have been led down many paths over the last few weeks. From creating dinosaur worlds, zoos, farms and giant zip lines, we have loved exploring and extending our play.

We are also enjoying lots of reading and story time, dough gym, write dance and makaton signing. Our cooking and science experiments are very popular too.

July 2023

We have had another busy year at Kempshott Under Fives with everything from sports days and gardening to talent shows, junk modeling and woodland walks. The children have learnt so much, made some lovely friendships and they’ve grown in confidence and independence.

We said goodbye to our older children in July with a lovely graduation party and picnic with family and friends. Although we are sad to see them go, we know they are all completely ready for their next adventures at their new schools.

Thank you to our wonderful parents for all of their support through the year and to our lovely children for making our jobs so much fun.

We have been doing settling in sessions to meet our new children that are joining us in September and we are looking forward to welcoming them into preschool after the summer holidays and hearing all about our returning children’s summer adventures.

In our next academic year we will continue to encompass Forest School ideas and activities and into our preschool curriculum and that staff are also learning about the principles of Hygge in the early years to bring more togetherness, relaxation and calm into our setting.

Have a great summer!

Preschool opens for the new academic year on Monday 4th September.

June 2023

We have had a busy few weeks and have been focusing on school readiness and independence for our older children – the younger children have also joined in with the help of a few adaptations.

The weather has been amazing, so we have spent lots of time in the garden and the children have been busy tending to their vegetable patch and eating our first crop of strawberries.

We held our sports day week in June and we also made special treats for Father’s day. The children are continuing to enjoy the mindfulness room after lunch every day and we have now added some new resources including bouncing butterflies and magic expanding balls.

We are now making plans for our graduation party to end the year with a little celebration picnic for our children and families. 

May 2023

The highlight of the month has been the King’s Coronation. We used lots of red, white and blue in our play and the children created wonderful bunting and made crowns with jewels. We celebrated with a snack time that was definitely fit for a King – scones, jam and cream!

We’ve had some lovely spring weather so the children have been outside enjoying their gardening projects. The carrots and lettuce seeds are planted and the strawberry plants are potted. The children enjoyed helping with digging and planting and were very good at following instructions on the seed packets. Our new story garden is taking shape, we have bark and planters and a lovely story bench and chair. The children have also been bug hunting and using magnifying glasses and picture cards to identify lots of mini beasts from the garden.

At the request of the children we created a role-play area in the garden this month. We introduced a McDonalds drive through! Our outdoor playhouse was converted into the McDonald’s building and the children have been driving up on bikes, scooters and ride ons.

Inside we have been continuing with activities to help the children understand how important it is to look after ourselves, we are using lots of glitter jars and light up resources, which really help the children to be peaceful and relax.

Up until the end of term we will be putting lots of work into school readiness for our older children. We have introduced some structure through our “Big School” groups and are following some fun activities to promote number recognition, personal and social skills, listening and understanding, health and self care to name a few. We have also begun to practise writing our names!

April 2023

We have had fun following the children’s interests this term and have taken lots of photos on our walks, learnt more about robots and created our own robots with foil covered blocks, we’ve planned weddings and even created wedding cakes. The children have also been busy in the garden getting ready for our growing season.

Our older children had some very exciting news over the Easter holidays – they found out which schools they will be going to in September! It’s always 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 to 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.

March 2023

We have enjoyed our spring term at Kempshott Under Fives. Amongst our usual activities, there has been sunshine, snow, books, pancakes, Mother’s Day and we are now in the countdown to Easter.

One of our favourite things at Kempshott Under Fives is books – and world book day was the perfect opportunity for us to share our favourite stories. Every member of staff shared their favourite book. Louise read “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” and she created lots of amazing bear activities, from creating bears from toilet rolls and paper plates, using our number recognition to count little bears and we also went on a big adventure and had a bear hunt in the garden.

Suzi shared the classic tale of the “The Three Little Pigs”. The children then acted out the story and made their own houses with different resources.

Alison chose our favourite author, Julia Donaldson, and “What the ladybird heard”. The children marked a map with their own directions, just as the thieves did in the book. We made play dough ladybirds and used our fine motor skills to pick up mini toy ladybirds with tweezers.

Amy and read “Room on the Broom”, another lovely Julia Donaldson story. We then used our story sack and the children could re-tell the story as a group. The children made witches wands but their favourite activity was making potions in the water tray.

Children dressed up through the week and we had Peter Rabbit, Arabella the Poo Detective, Goldilocks and lots of Harry Potters. We also found funny places to read our books and we finished off world book day with a “virtual” bedtime story read by Alison that evening.

We experimented with pancake ingredients on Shrove Tuesday and we flipped pancakes and ate them too! We also showed the children a lovely experiment involving sweets and water, which created a lovely rainbow.

We celebrate Holi Hindi each year at preschool, a colourful ancient Hindu festival to welcome the arrival of spring and celebrate the end of winter. Ironically this year it brought lots of snow with it! We had a great time playing with snowballs and we used the snow as our canvas for lots of bright paint splatting in the garden.

The children created lovely cards for Mother’s Day and we enjoyed welcoming Mummies and Nannies into preschool to spend some time with us and enjoy a little Mother’s Day treat.

We are now in the lead up to Easter and have lost of bonnet creations underway; we also have an Easter egg trail in the garden with chocolate eggs to find!

February 2023

It has been a busy month at Kempshott Under Fives; this half term has flown by!

For Lunar New Year we experimented with lots of different Chinese foods, prawn crackers were the firm favourite! Valentines week was all about exploring the colours of red, white and pink. We mixed colours, printed with hearts, made wonderful cards and used ice cube hearts and rose petals in our water play. We also kicked off our fundraising for the year and raised lots of money to create a story garden we are planning for the spring.

As always there has been plenty of time outdoors, we have been on bear hunts on our Tuesday walks and the children have been very helpful in preparing the garden for spring, they have cleared lots of leaves and prepared the digging areas with new soil. Of course they have also been getting very muddy in the mud kitchen. The children are always great detectives when we are outdoors and they really take notice of the seasonal changes in the garden. They notice the new leaves on trees and have noticed some flowers coming through too. We’re looking forward to doing our own bit of gardening later this term and planting some spring bulbs. We joined in with the RSPB Garden Bird watch event a few weeks ago and the children made their own birdfeeders and kept a close watch on the bird table with binoculars.

We have been enjoying structured afternoon group activities in preschool; our favourite activity so far has been to remember the items under the blanket. This tests the children’s observation skills, memory and vocabulary skills – they are all amazing at this game!

January 2023

It was lovely to welcome the children back to Kempshott Under Fives after the Christmas break and to hear about their adventures and their Christmas presents. We also welcomed some new children into preschool who have settled in brilliantly. The first week was all about getting back into routine, playing with friends and exploring our curiosity and creativity.

The garden has been great for puddles and getting muddy, and the children have also been very helpful with clearing leaves and tidying up. They have also dug up worms and asked lots of questions. We have shared a book all about garden worms and found out lots of facts about how worms work and benefit our gardens.

Each term we look at the different seasons, and our outdoor activities this term will continue to enhance our children’s understanding of the world with more weather and seasons activities in the garden and on our walks. We are also continuing to encourage the children’s growing independence by practicing putting on scarves, hats, gloves and wellies before going outside.

December 2022

We finished off 2022 with a lovely Christmassy month in preschool. The children decorated our tree, did lots of Christmas craft and practiced their numbers with counting baubles.

Reverend Nicola visited to tell us the story of Christmas and the children loved the wooden nativity characters she told the story with. We had a sing around the Christmas tree in church, which was lovely. And of course there is always cooking for Christmas so we baked mince pie puffs and decorated Christmas biscuits. The children also practiced Christmas yoga with poses such as the star, the Christmas tree, the reindeer and the sleigh.

The home corner was the most magical place to be in December – we transformed it into Santa’s workshop where the children could do present wrapping, posting cards and writing to Father Christmas.

The last day of term was a Christmas party for all of the children – complete with a visit from Father Christmas.

We’re now looking forward to our first week back for a new term at preschool and hearing the children talk about their holidays and what presents they got for Christmas. Every January we see children recreating some of their favourite Christmas memories through their play, such as Christmas cake making, laying the tables for dinners with family, and wrapping presents, just like Mummy does! This links perfectly to the Department for Education's "Early Year's Outcomes" which says that a typical child should be able to "remember and talk about significant events in their own experiences" and "recognise and describe special times or events for family or friends".

November 2022

November was full of fun and colour – we started off with fireworks and Diwali. We made clay tea light holders and we used lots of colour and textures to create some wonderful firework pictures.

For Remembrance Day we made yummy poppy biscuits and the children created poppies to cover our preschool windows, they also joined in with a two-minute silence and did an incredible job!

It was Children in Need in November and we had a lovely week in preschool doing lots of Pudsey inspired activities. The children were invited to dress up in their favourite fun clothes and staff came to preschool dressed up too. We also took part in World Nursery Rhyme Week, which celebrates the importance of nursery rhymes in early childhood development.

Our children love gardening – so in between the rainy days this month we have been busy tidying the garden, the children even found some carrots that we missed digging up earlier in the year and they planted some spring bulbs ready to put some colour in the garden next year.

We are of course continuing with our small group work every week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; Science experiments and our cooking sessions when we make or bake treats each week. Next on the baking table will be some yummy Christmas goodies and preschool will soon be full of festive glitter and sparkle!

October 2022

This half term we have been exploring the topic of autumn. We have spent lots of time outdoors discovering autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. While we’ve been outdoors, we’ve collected conkers, pine cones, twigs and leaves, which are all great natural resources to use in preschool at this time of year. There has been no end of fun with conkers and acorns – the children have looked at them through magnifying glasses, counted them out, rolled them down guttering, cooked with them in the mud kitchen, created paintings with them and even tried to weigh them in some old fashioned scales!

We’ve had some beautiful weather this term, so the children have been busy in the garden. They have been weeding the vegetable patch and they have also noticed that the beech nuts have been taken out of their shells. With a little detective work and keen eyes we spotted the squirrels in the garden.

At Kempshott Under Fives, we encourage the children’s interest in books and stories, so we were very lucky to be visited by “ Stepping into Stories” this month. The children took part in a fun story and music session based around the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. We were able to make music with porridge bowls, rock baby bear to sleep and move our bodies to reflect the family of bears. It was a lovely way to explore a story with the children. The children were also invited to a harvest story time in the church. We planned some activities around this and explained where our food comes from. We had different vegetables in the tuff tray and the children used the vegetables to paint and print.

Coming up in our next half term we will be getting creative with clay when we celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and with bonfire night coming up we’ll be using lots of colour to create our own fireworks and will be exploring lots of sounds for firework night too.

SEPTEMBER 2022

The first few weeks are flying by at Kempshott Under Fives. Some lovely new friendships have been made and our little ones have been getting to know each other with our “All About Me” topic. We’ve also been learning about autumn.

We’ve been making the most of the weather and our outdoor time and discovering all the autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. We will soon be collecting lots of natural resources to use in preschool, such as pine cones, conkers and leaves – all great for our creative projects. We are also starting to think about animals that hibernate as part of our autumn topic.

At Kempshott Under Fives we work with ‘in the moment’ planning. This involves us seizing the moments when children show interest and curiosity in something by immediately supporting their next steps.  We watch what our little ones are doing in the moment, we can then link it with their interests and help move their learning on. For example, if we can see the children are talking about classrooms and school, we would seize this opportunity to extend their interest in school life by changing our role-play area into a school. Staff can engage with children by following and supporting their interest and extend their learning experience.  One activity might be mark making in a register – this can encourage a child who is not usually interested in putting pencil to paper to engage with these activities when their interests are extended ‘in the moment’.

We are still enjoying lots of reading and story time, dough gym, write dance and makaton signing. Our cooking and science experiments are very popular too.

June 2022

The year has flown at Kempshott Under Fives and it’s nearly time to say goodbye to our children leaving for primary school. They’ve all gained so much confidence and independence and are completely ready for their next exciting adventure… But we’ve still got lots more fun to squeeze into our final few weeks!

There has been a lot happening this term. Our older children have been focusing on school readiness and independence. We’ve also had some amazing weather to enjoy time in the garden and the children have been busy tending to their vegetable patch. We had a big week creating special treats for Father's Day and we are currently planning a super fun mini sports day for a few weeks time. 

Very soon our older children will be leaving us for their next adventures at primary school, so we are looking forward to celebrating their time at preschool with a Graduation party.

TRANSITION

Very soon many of the children will be moving on to their new “big” schools. It’s an exciting time but we should remember that change is difficult for us all. At Kempshott Under Fives we do our best to support the children and help them through the transitions into new schools. Research suggests that transitions are central to young children’s development and emotional well being, and the way in which the first transitions are handled could have a significant impact on the child’s capacity to cope with change in the short and long term. At Kempshott Under Fives we support the transition process in a range of ways. We help to prepare a child for school by liaising closely with the schools, working with our families, taking the views of the child into account and providing 'school-like' experiences. What is very important to remember is that TRANSITION IS A PROCESS NOT A SINGLE EVENT.

May 2022

Over the past few weeks the children have bug hunting and then using books and the Internet to identify the bugs we have found. Most of our bugs were discovered in the new wildlife area where the children have planted wildflowers to attract bees and butterflies. It’s definitely been the weather to enjoy outdoors so the children have also been painting twigs, gardening, balancing on the beams, using the climbing frame, enjoying outdoor story times and they have even eaten lunch al fresco. We have also had fun flying paper aeroplanes in the sunshine.

In this term’s giant junk modelling session the children showed amazing teamwork and made some seriously impressive creations - from cars and shakers, to boats and giant robots.

We also took part in mental health awareness week and planned some activities to help the children understand how important it is to look after ourselves, both mentally and physically. We discussed eating the right foods, practised mindfulness to help us relax and listened to calming music and imagined we were on a sunny beach.

From now until the end of term we will be putting lots of work into school readiness for our older children and each day we will be having fun with activities to promote number recognition, personal and social skills, listening and understanding, health and self care to name a few.

April 2022

In the lead up to the Easter holidays the children enjoyed lots of Easter activities – filling up plastic eggs and hiding them in the room, treasure hunts, chick racing and an Easter trail to collect coloured ribbons in exchange for a chocolate egg from the Easter bunny!

We have had fun following the children’s interests this month and have learnt all about aeroplanes, we’ve formed a music band and we’ve done some DIY. We’ve also been busy in the garden and have planted carrots, kale, tomatoes and parsley. The children have planted beans and are now doing a beanstalk challenge to see how tall they grow.

Our older children had some very exciting news over the Easter holidays – they found out which schools they will be going to in September! It’s always 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.

March 2022 

March has flown by at Kempshott Under Fives.

We have been enjoying the brighter weather and are making big plans for the garden. We’ve been writing lists of things to grow and so far the children have requested tomatoes, carrots, sweetcorn and flowers. They have even drawn some lovely pictures to help us find the correct seeds.

The children made beautiful cards for Mothers Day and have been very busy with Easter craft. We celebrated Holi Hindu, an ancient Hindu festival to welcome the arrival of spring and celebrate the end of winter and the children had a great time paint splatting.

We also celebrated World Book Day and we all dressed up as our favourite book characters. We had lots of characters coming to preschool, including Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, sharks and dragons. We also really enjoyed the children bringing in their favourite books to share – we read every book, with some of the children joining in to read too. We particularly enjoyed a very funny book about never using a knife and fork... this caused much hilarity, especially at lunchtime when we talked about squeezing our cheese between our knees

As well as a great opportunity to have tasty snacks, Pancake Day was a good opportunity to get some coloured blocks out and do come counting. We voted on the best toppings and used coloured blocks for each vote. When we counted up the blocks at the end we found out that nutella was the most popular topping and lemon was the least favourite.

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.

February 2022

February is always a busy month for us with Valentine’s Day, Chinese New Year and Pancake Day.

2022 is the year of the Tiger and we did lots of activities to celebrate Chinese new year. We made Chinese lanterns and turned our role-play area into a Chinese restaurant (the prawn crackers didn’t last long)! A big project for the week involved making large dragons using cardboard boxes and we did a special dragon dance at the end of the week to traditional Chinese music.

We also had a visit from a local author, Leanne Edney, who grew up in Kempshott. She read the children her new book “The Dancing Dragon” from the Gigi and the Giant Ladle series. It was a lovely end to Chinese New Year for the children.

Valentines week was full of arts and crafts and the children made some very special creations for loved ones.

It’s been lovely to see the signs of spring appearing at Kempshott Under Fives – we’re making the most of being outdoors and the children have been great detectives and really taken notice of the seasonal changes in the garden. They have pointed out new leaves on trees and we’re starting to see some flowers coming through too. We’re looking forward to doing our own bit of gardening later this term and planting some spring bulbs. We’ve also made warm hedgehog houses from lots of leaves in the garden for our hibernating animals.

Lots of our children have a huge interest in dinosaurs so we had a dinosaur week in February, the children also spent a lot of time talking about the new Disney film Encanto, so we did lots of Encanto inspired activities and created an Encanto small world; We had a visit from Cookie the guinea pig and some of the children have been watching the winter Olympics so we made messy play snow from flour, oats and cornflour! Very gloopy!

At Kempshott Under Fives we promote mental health and wellbeing every day by role modeling positive language and communications, by showing emotions in positive ways and using calming techniques when we encounter big emotions. We had a lovely focus activity for mental health week, which was ‘filling up each other’s cups’. The children were given a cup of milkshake, but Delphine the puppet only had a cup that was half full so she was feeling sad. We filled her cup up with compliments and then we did the same with all of our friends. Lots of lovely words such as kind, funny and nice shoes were used.

January 2022 - Happy New Year!

It was lovely to welcome the children back to Kempshott Under Fives after the Christmas break and to hear about their adventures and their Christmas presents. We also welcomed some new children into preschool who have all settled in brilliantly.

Last term we spent time looking at winter and the seasons, so all of our outdoor activities this term will continue to enhance our children’s understanding of the world with more weather and seasons activities in the garden and on our walks. We are also continuing to encourage the children’s growing independence by practicing putting on scarves, hats, gloves and wellies before going outside.

We’ve had fun with the role play area this term – the children have been enjoying Mummy’s and Daddy’s, doggies, babies and Paw Patrol!

We are continuing with our small group work each week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; we are still having fun with our science experiments and makaton signing.  You can see weekly updates from Kempshott Under Fives on our Facebook page “Kempshott Under Fives”, where you will see lots of photos of our preschool in action.

December - Happy Christmas from Kempshott Under Fives!

We haven't stopped this month - we have enjoyed Christmas songs, Christmas tree decorating, elf on the shelf antics, Christmas crafting and baking, and we've been practising for our Christmas sing a long!

We marked the end of term with a Christmas party for all the children where we enjoyed games and party food, and we finished it off with a performance of Christmas songs for our families.

Wishing you all a restful Christmas break and we are looking forward to more adventures in the new year!

November 2021 - a month of fun and colour!

Over the last month we’ve been exploring the season of autumn and have spent lots of time outdoors looking at autumn colours, listening to autumn sounds and collecting lovely natural resources to use in preschool.

November was full of fun and colour – we started off with fireworks and Diwali. We were joined by a special guest for Diwali who told us the story of Diwali and showed us some lovely outfits and dances. The children designed Mendhi patterns on paper and on our hands, we made clay tea light holders and we watched an episode of Peppa Pig celebrating Diwali too.

For our fireworks theme we used lots of colour and textures to create some wonderful firework pictures. Our best firework pictures were created by throwing painted tea bags at paper in the garden, it captured the explosion effect perfectly!

For Remembrance Day we learnt the Makaton sign for poppy. We also made wreaths, a group poppy picture and we made poppy biscuits with chocolate button centres. The children also joined in with a two-minute silence and did an incredible job!

We helped raise some money for Children in Need in November and we had a lovely week in preschool doing lots of Pudsey inspired activities with the children. We also invited everyone to dress up through the week in their favourite fun clothes and staff came to preschool dressed in pyjamas.

This term we have been busy with mark making in lots of different ways, we have had the table horizontal and vertical, we have created large drawings on the floor, used small bits of paper, experimented with paint, pens, pencils, crayons. We give the children these experiences as the different motions help to promote muscle growth and strength and pre-writing skills as well as gross and fine motor skills. We give the children the freedom to be creative and use any resources they like, in any way they like – in our pre-writing and mark making exercises it is about the process not the product.

We have also celebrated World Nursery Rhyme Week and Odd Sock Day.

We are of course continuing with our small group work every week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; Science experiments and our cooking sessions when we make or bake treats each week. Next on the baking table will be some yummy Christmas goodies as we are now entering the month of glitter, sparkle and Christmas cheer!

October 2021 - Our first half term completed!

We’ve had a great first half term at Kempshott Under Fives – some lovely new friendships have been formed and our little ones have been getting to know each other with our “All About Me” topic. We’ve also been learning all about autumn.

We’ve made the most of our outdoor time and discovered all the autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. We’ve been on scavenger hunts in the fields and church garden looking out for conkers, pine cones, twigs and leaves, which are all great natural resources to use in preschool at this time of year. After half term we will be spending more time outdoors and encouraging the children to get their listening ears on and listen out for the wonderful sounds of autumn such as crunching leaves, wind in the trees, splashy puddles and lots more. We are also looking at animals that hibernate as part of our autumn topic. Lots of children have spoken about hedgehogs, so we had fun playing pin the nose on the hedgehog. Hedgehog has also been one of our words to learn in our weekly Makaton signing lessons.

The children have really enjoyed our All About Me topic – they looked in the mirror and made self-portraits using various materials. It’s been fun to notice similarities and differences between us all and we made a tally chart of who had what colour hair and eyes. We also played games to identify if we were wearing pink or blue and if we had short hair, long hair, were a boy, a girl, wore stripy socks, wellyboots or trainers. The children are fascinated with the photocopier so we’ve also been photocopying our hands and comparing them!

Coming up in November we will be getting creative with clay when we celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and with bonfire night coming up we’ll be using lots of colour to create our own fireworks and we’ll be exploring lots of sounds for firework night too. It’s pumpkin season too so we’ll be making some yummy pumpkin soup with the children.

September 2021 - Welcome to a new year at Kempshott Under Fives!

Welcome back! We love the start of a new academic year at Kempshott Under Fives – it’s lovely to see how much our returning children have grown over the summer holidays and it’s wonderful to meet our new children too.

Transitions can be challenging for young children, so our first few weeks are all about settling in, exploring the new environment, making new friends and looking after the children's well-being – this helps to make the transition as smooth as possible.  All children are individuals, and while some children will adjust fairly easily and quickly to new routines, others will take longer to feel comfortable and secure. At Kempshott Under Fives we work hard to ensure that all children settle happily.

Our first topic “All About Me” is a great chance for the children to learn all about themselves, their new friends and their families. We use stories, arts, crafts and songs to help our children discover what is unique and special about themselves and each other.

As the weather is still good the children have been making the most of the garden. We will be using our outdoor learning environment as much as possible and we have some great activities planned for extending our children’s learning outdoors. We’ll also be learning about autumn this term and exploring colours, outdoor sounds and hibernating animals. There will be lots of sticks and leaves to collect to build bug hotels and hedgehog houses. And we’ll be holding weekly cooking sessions and weekly science experiments too.

July 2021 - the end of a wonderful year!

What a great year we’ve had at Kempshott Under Fives! We had a lovely send off for our older children that are leaving for school; they enjoyed a party with lots of food and games, followed by a graduation ceremony in the garden. We wish all of our children lots of luck and happiness in their new schools and although we’re sad to see them go, we know they are all completely ready for this next adventure.

There have been so many highlights this year - we’ve hosted a sponsored obstacle course, enjoyed a fun Christmas party, spent lots of time outdoors and built a new climbing frame in the garden. We have even hatched our own butterflies! The children have learnt so much and they’ve grown in confidence and independence too.

Thank you to our wonderful parents for all of their support through the year and to our lovely children for making our jobs so much fun.

We are now looking forward to welcoming our new starters to Kempshott Under Fives in September and hearing all about our returning children’s summer adventures.

Have a great summer!