Can you believe we are at the half term point already!

We started the term getting to know each other and building those all-important key person relationships. The Little Owls team adapted their practice for the needs of each individual child and all of them have made so much progress, it is amazing to see. We also used this time to see how much our returning Little Owls had grown and developed and wow they breezed back into preschool like they had never been away! Lots of vehicle play and painting has been a comfort to lots of the children, so these have been readily available and they have made good use of our paint supplies!

The conker drop of 2023 started and autumn has been a big part of our learning through the half term. It becomes a bit of a competition between the team, who can come up with the best conker activity (feel free to get creative and pass on your ideas).  We have had baking, weighing, painting, rolling, floating, and sinking all with conkers. We really are lucky to have such a great resource right in the garden.

Boxted Bakery was another big hit this half term and the children really enjoyed role playing in the garden bakery. We made dough, baked cakes (including conker cakes and mud cakes), bought cakes for our friends, took telephone orders, and just had a really fun time. During this play we often saw our older children leading and supporting our younger children in their play, they sustained their play and often revisited, such lovely play to watch.

We decided to have a week dedicated to The Gruffalo as many of the children seemed captivated by the story. The team quickly flipped their plans, we made Gruffalo crumble, lots of Gruffalo dressing up, an underground house (den making), story sequencing and some of our Little Owls told the story at story time. Amazing!

Our final week was fondly named pumpkin week and yes you guessed it, it involved a lot of pumpkins! Painting, drawing, hammering, scooping, glooping, mixing, pouring, sticking, gluing, rolling and bowling! A huge thank you to Tesco for donating all the pumpkins for the children to explore, it provided so many learning opportunities.

As a team we would like to say a huge thank you for all the lovely comments you left for us on #NurseryPractionerDay.  It really means so much to us to have so much support from our families. It is a privilege that you choose us to care for your little ones.

It has been a fantastic half term and we hope you all enjoy the half term break.

Lots of plans for when we return:  Diwali, fireworks and of course Christmas!

Well that’s it, another term has come to an end and another school year is over!

We started the term welcoming our tiny frogs and we found a new home for them at Boxted St Peters Primary school. Some of our Little Owls were lucky enough to go and release them and spend some time pond dipping, so we could see who they would be living with in their new habitat.

A visit from Essex Police started some lovely learning about people who help us, the children learnt that they don’t just catch bad guys, they keep us safe too! 999 is the number to call if you need them and we saw the children putting this into practice in the police station role play. Not to be outdone, the Fire service came to visit too. They were very impressed our Little Owls knew who to call in an emergency. We got to see Nicola dress up as a firefighter, which caused the children some amusement. We saw the long ladders, large cutting equipment, flashing lights, loud sirens and we got to squirt the hose! In addition, we have turned our role play area into a hospital, a school, a hairdressers, and a post office, enabling the children to explore different occupations and the people that help us. Marie, the community champion from Tesco, even came to visit with a donation of fresh fruit! Thank you Tesco!

 The park, school or café are all in our community and the children love to visit them all, we have been able to learn about directions and maps and found our way to the post box to post some special mail.  At the end of the last half term we were joined by The Boxted Runners, they helped and supported us to have a fantastic sponsored fun run and we raised a phenomenal amount for our wonderful preschool, thank you all very much.

We have continued to support all our Little Owls with their resilience and independence and over the last half term some of them have been getting ready for their transition into ‘BIG SCHOOL’. They have been out to visit their new schools and teachers have come to visit us. It’s an exciting time but also a little scary. Supporting them to understand these feelings has been important to us and we have included activities on feelings, looked at books, shared stories and pictures sent from schools, but most importantly we had lots of cuddles!

We ended the term with a little leavers ceremony and our Little Owls were presented with their certificates. The main event though was the goodbye song, the children had worked so hard practicing and they smashed it, not a dry eye in the house, proud parents and Little Owls ladies! We will miss every one of them, but we know they are ready for the next part of their journey.

Honestly I could write about our adventures for hours, I haven’t even mentioned our continuing forest school sessions or mini boot camps, we have so much fun and we have even spent some time getting to know our new Little Owls that will be joining us in September.

Have an amazing summer everyone and we will see you in September!

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!

Wow we have come to the end of another term! Where does the time go?

We started this term with some beautiful new storage in the garden, which means our Little Owls have access to everything they could need for their play.  We love to promote their independence and their critical thinking and we have really seen them embrace this side of their learning.

As we celebrated pancake day the children took all the ingredients they might need to the mud kitchen to make their own pancakes – pouring, mixing, squeezing and lots of working together and with the introduction of a microwave it really was a hive of activity.

We also celebrated World Book Day with the children and the Little Owls team, creating some lovely interpretations of their favourite book characters. The team also emphasised books more than usual within their invitations to play. As you all know, we love books at Little Owls and reading together is so beneficial to developing early reading skills. Hopefully you have all seen on our social media we have been sharing the story of the month for Essex Year of Reading – some lovely stories to share together.

The weather has certainly provided lots of learning opportunities for us over the past half term, we have seen sun, snow, wind and rain! We’ve made tracks in the snow, caught snowflakes on our tongues, collected water from the drainpipe and jumped in puddles.  The rain also gave us the opportunity to create a mudslide at forest school and encourage the children to give it a try.

A request by one Little Owl to bake heart shaped biscuits turned into an afternoon of baking together and preparing their own snack. An activity where everyone could get involved and take on different roles and responsibilities.

We planted sunflowers for some special people in our lives and created our very own labels. We hope everyone had a wonderful Mother’s day and your sunflowers are growing strong, we would love to see pictures.

Oral health is so important and we were lucky enough to have 6 oral health students come to visit us to teach our Little Owls about good oral health. It was a lovely interactive and informative session that everyone really got involved with, so much fun was had brushing the big teeth and dressing up as a dentist, we hope to welcome them back soon.

One of the most exciting weeks we have had is science week.  A week filled with awe and wonder, critical thinking, being inquisitive and excitement. Experiments, plasma balls, stomp rockets and the children’s favourite – erupting volcanos!

The children are still enjoying large construction and this half term they stepped it up and built their own Thomas train with large boxes, tape and paint. They then added crates from the garden for the carriages and we couldn’t resist adding a tape track to the floor for them. They then spent the afternoon playing together in a large group – great collaborative play.

We ended the term with our week of stay and play sessions. It’s great to have our families in the setting, sharing learning and play with their Little Owls. The children love to show off their preschool and the things they can do.

We have recently had the arrival of frogspawn into preschool.  We have started to observe the changes quickly (quicker than we expected) so we hopefully will capture pictures as they change through the Easter holidays. This starts off next term nicely as we can look at lifecycles, watch caterpillars turn into butterflies and our seeds start to flower.

Next half term we will see the King’s Coronation, an historical event, that we are excited to share with our Little Owls – watch this space for our celebration plans!

Our older Little Owls will be notified of their school places on 17^th April, scary and exciting times ahead.  Please can we ask you to let one of the Little Owls team know which school your child has been offered a place at so we can prepare for their transition into reception. As always, the team are on hand to help and support you with any questions or concerns you have, please just ask.

We hope you all have a lovely Eater break and will see you back on Monday 17^th April for a new term.

Our first half term of 2023 has come to an end and although it has been a short one it has been incredibly busy!

Our Little Owls have shown a keen interest in construction recently, so we decided to have a move around in the room to give them lots of floor space to build and create some wonderful tall towers and wide bridges using various resources. We also moved lots of loose parts play outside to reignite their interest and really develop their critical thinking skills. They have shown us how they can share resources and work together to reach their goal – great teamwork! We introduced a new deep tray into the room that we filled with sand or water, the children loved exploring capacity, tipping, pouring and scooping.

As Chinese New Year was celebrated, we learnt about some of their customs, traditions and the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. We developed our gross motor movements with Chinese dragon dancing and our fine motor skills using chopsticks and writing Chinese letters. This half term we also learnt a little about Scotland as they celebrated Burn’s night, reading some Robert Burns poetry, listening to bagpipes, dancing the highland fling and baking our own shortbread – YUM!

Reading together is so beneficial to our Little Owls and National story telling week is every week for us! We promoted this week with lots of activities linked to familiar stories, we made Gruffalo crumble, we painted underpants for an aliens love underpants display (a favourite story at the moment) and cuddled our owl babies until their mummy returned. We also gave the children the opportunities to tell their own stories, some chose to tell familiar stories and some became very imaginative and at forest school we were crossing rope bridges to escape from ferocious crocodiles!

We finished the half term filled with love! Our Little Owls created pictures and wrote cards for special people in their lives. They loved exploring pink gloopy potions and manipulating red sparkly playdough.

The Little Owls team have set up some lovely invitations to play for the children to enjoy, but the children still lead their own learning and we never know where our day will take us, race tracks to space and beyond!

When we return from our half term break its pancake day!! We love to cook and bake at Little Owls and pancakes for snack are always a hit. The 2^nd March is World Book Day, who doesn’t like dressing up? I wonder what the team will dress up as this year? British science week falls in March and is always filled with critical thinking and Awe and Wonder. As we head towards the end of March there may be a special day we have to prepare for but it will remain top secret!