Dear Parents/Carers,
Welcome to our January newsletter…
We hope you all had a lovely Christmas!
A little reminder on our staff updates for January:
Tulips room – Sandra, Jenny, Kaitlyn, Natasha
Daisies room – Katie.R, Emily, Kristie, Katie.S, Michela, Rianne, Jodi
Lilies room – Louisa, Navreet, Ellie, Jodie, Gemma, Nadia, Stephanie, Charlotte
Bluebells room – Becky, Coriena, Chelsea, Mya, Harriett, Bethan
Also, the wonderful Abi will be going on Maternity leave with her planned last day being the 12th January. During her Maternity Zoe will be covering Manager, working alongside Natasha and Becky will be covering deputy manager.
As always, if you need to discuss anything, please do not hesitate to contact us via the Famly app or by contacting the office, and we will be happy to help.
Have a great month and please keep an eye on the Famly App for updates!
This month Bluebells have had fun exploring Winter. They have enjoyed looking at what happens to the environment when the temperature goes under zero. They have created their own snowflakes to help decorate the room for Christmas and even made different snowmen out of paper, playdough and real snow.
The children in Bluebells have had lots of fun in the home corner acting out real life Christmas role plays. They have had lots of mark making opportunities in writing their own Christmas cards and giving wrapping presents a go. They all helped to decorate the Christmas tree and one of their favourite things to do has been to find the cheeky elves!
Bluebells have really liked exploring the field in general and this time of year they have enjoyed trying to break the icy muddy puddles and we even had a snowball fight. The children gave it a good go of making a snowman themselves, but the snow was very fine this year – they had fun just throwing it and making their own snow in the air!
Bluebells have been doing some science experiments around the snow melty and what happens if we add baking powder and vinegar. The children loved to see the fizzing of the snow and watching it turn to slush.
In the month of January our topic will be “all about me”. We will be looking at the similarities and differences between one another – exploring mirrors and making some self-portraits. We will be thinking about our likes and dislikes and looking at where we live.
Our book of the month will be called “You Choose”.
From January we will be restarting our letter and number of the week. We will have activities around the focused letter and number during the week and at circle times speak about this.
During December Lilies have had so much fun playing in the Snow building snow people, having snowball fights and creating snow angels. We have had great fun in our huge igloo too, creating magical atmospheres within it. We’ve enjoyed creating paper plate reindeers and Santa’s too. We have been creating Christmas collages with different materials and many Christmas related paintings too, using forks to make snowflake creations. We’ve created our own melting snow people biscuits too, placing marshmallows on and icing on eyes, buttons, arms and a carrot nose. Lilies have also been learning different Christmas sign language too. We’ve signed ‘reindeer, snow, Father Christmas, Advent Calendar’ and many more. They have done brilliantly with this and have been so very excited for Christmas!
As Lilies have been really enjoying small world play, vehicles and animals too, We’ve decided our topic of the month for January will be ‘The World’. During the weeks of January, we’ve decided to do a continent a month in which the staff will pick a country from that continent to provide Lilies with knowledge of those countries. As there is 5 weeks in January we have decided that these will be the continents on each week.
1 – Antarctica & Oceania
2- America
3- Asia (Chinese new year is on 22/01 so we will celebrate it throughout this week)
4- Africa
5- Europe
During each week the children will learn a variety of different things such as animals in those continents, transport used. Dancing to different cultured music and even food tasting for some countries too! We are very excited to share these experiences with you.
As the Lilies had shown more interest in our book of the month during December as ‘That’s not my reindeer’ we’ve enjoyed creating reindeers on paper plates and discovering different sensory experiences and textures. Our book of the month during January will be ‘what a wonderful world’ which has some amazingly beautiful illustrations within it that capture our world within these illustrations, demonstrating some of the things in which we will see within the world, as this book really captures the beauty of our world. We will recreate our own pictures and illustrations through paintings and gluing and sticking as well as discovering what the world really looks likes using photos and a webcam to show the children what the world really looks like.
Throughout December the Daisies have enjoyed our topic of Winter. We have been exploring different sensory experiences such as ice play, scented playdough and much more! The Daisies have learnt about the different animals that live in cold environments and even had the chance to play with real snow in our activities. The favourite activity this month was our snowball tuff tray, that then got extended by adding real snow and turning into a snowball fight!
Our signing session has started off really well this year, providing lots of different opportunities for the children to join in and sign back to us. We have noticed the children using some signs during their play and our circle times without the need for prompting.
We have also noticed that the children in Daisies have gained so much more confidence in their play and communication recently which is fantastic. We know they are going to come back after Christmas saying so much more! We really enjoyed our Christmas stay and play session, creating reindeer food and making melted snowmen biscuits. Thank you to the parents who could join us for this session, the children really enjoyed it.
For January, our topic will be Health and fitness. We will be going on some lovely walks and adventures around the farm, having obstacles to climb along the way. We will also have the return of our Jo jingles dancing sessions, Yoga and much more to keep us active! We will start to look at the different fruit and vegetables that give us energy, using them in messy play and role play activities. Alongside this we will be learning new signs for the fruit and vegetables we enjoy eating at snack times.
We wish you all a merry Christmas and look forward to seeing you in the new year!
Tulips (Ages 3 – 15 months)
In December our topic in Tulips has been winter. We have enjoyed exploring many different tuff trays such as fake snow and making snowballs. Lots of play dough this topic too which was great fun. We have been creating our own Christmas trees, Christmas puddings and Santa hats!
Having had snow for a few days, we loved exploring some real snow in a tuff tray. We explored it through touch and observed it melting during our play. This month we have been busy with lots of crafts and creating our Christmas gifts to send home. During our crafts we created some beautiful winter scene paintings for our board int the room. To add to this we made reindeers using brushes and sponges. The Tulips have loved singing Christmas songs and using our musical instruments to make our own tune which was great fun. We learnt some new actions and the children tried very hard to copy our movements.
This month our topic will be role play. The children have shown a great interest in dolls and our home corner. We have decided to extend this and cover different areas in our next topic. Eg: Doctors, Vets, Teacher, chef. We will enjoy some great tuff trays to extend our learning and explore new things.
We love caring for our dolls so we will be feeding them and dressing them. We will be making a cot to use for our dolls too. Using playdough we will be making food and talking about healthy choices. All the children love animals so we will include this in one of our weeks. We will be caring for the animals and using dress up clothes to express creativity. We will be including lots of messy play, such as large scale painting whilst using different resources, foam play and gloop.
Outdoor Clothing
Please can you make sure all clothing items are labelled with your child’s name or initials so we can make sure they are returned to the correct family.
Fund Raising
- Go to journey
- Go to new
- New observation
