The weeks are flying by and another half term is over!

This term we have been observing lots of changes around us.  We have seen forest school become greener, the trees start blossom and seedlings growing.  We have seen some lovely pictures about how well your sunflowers are growing and how well they are being looked after.  Back in April, we had tiny tadpoles and tiny caterpillars, now one month later we have froglets and beautiful butterflies.  Our Little Owls have been so engaged – checking on progress at every session and you can’t begin to believe the excitement when we noticed a wriggly chrysalis and a butterfly pushing its way out!  Our Little Owls could not take their eyes off it for a second.

As we got ready to celebrate the historic occasion of the King’s Coronation, we were asked by the local Boxted Wildlife Group to create a special banner for them to display at the Boxted Coronation event.  Hedgehogs were the theme and the children set to work using a variety of techniques – hand printing, sticking, fork painting and symmetrical printing – to create a wonderful banner. We hope you all saw it at the event.  Our preparations continued as we made our own crowns, flags and banners.  We learnt about the Union flag, the King’s Coronation crown and Buckingham Palace.  We also looked at new books, saw lots of pictures and shared experiences of special trips to London.  We ended our celebrations with a fantastic street style party for all our Little Owls, there was singing, dancing, party games and of course party food!  To mark such an historic occasion, we had medals engraved so every Little Owl had their very own Coronation medal, something for them to remember the event for many years to come!

Towards the end of the half term we were lucky enough to welcome Sarah from Buddies 4 Fitness.  She held a fantastic Mini Bootcamp session that really helped develop the children’s core strength.  The Little Owls had a great time and it led onto some learning about healthy eating, the benefits of physical exercise for our bodies and we also created some challenging obstacle courses!

To mark the end of the half term, we said goodbye to our butterflies, it was lovely to watch them fly off into the big wide world.  Our froglets will go on a little holiday with one of the Little Owls team and hopefully when we return, they will also be ready to go on their next adventure to the wildlife pond at Boxted School.

The final part of the term will be with us soon, when we will be getting some of our Little Owls ready for their next adventure!  We will be looking at our community, including new schools and people who help us.  These two topics link wonderfully together as we look at what makes a community and the people within it, maybe we will have some special visitors too.

As always as the weather gets warmer, we will spend lots of time outside, with lots of waterplay and sand play.  Please can we remind you all to apply suncream to your child in the morning before preschool.  We will apply it again at lunchtime for those children attending an all-day session.  Please can you also make sure that they have changes of clothes (including socks) and a sun hat.

We hope everyone has a lovely week and we will see you on Monday 5^th June!