This week the children have adjusted to the wet autumnal weather and continued to have lots of fun and games at playgroup. These have included:

• making up a story as a group. The characters suggested were: a unicorn, a dinosaur, a wolf and apples and pears! The story began with a wolf hiding behind a tree, the children then suggested that the dinosaur went past and the wolf ate it. They considered the demise of the unicorn but instead thought it would be better if it lived and the wolf got hit by apples and pears from the tree, which then hit his knees and so he went to hospital. The unicorn ate the apples and pears and went to sleep. The end! What a story, all created by a small group of three and four year olds with little prompting and a lot of keen ideas
• practicing recognising numbers
• listening games focused on animal sounds, environmental sounds and instrumental sounds and matching them to pictures continue to be popular
• junk modelling
• learning about the celebration of Rosh Hasannah. The children then decided to make cards to send to people they liked
• creating all sorts of things with large pieces of material, they have made these into dens, capes and wings
• forming letters and numbers during mark making
• looking at ourselves in the mirror, creating self portraits and looking at emotion cards
• asking the children about how we behave at pre-school and the children came up with lots of great suggestions. There main points were being kind and sharing toys. When I then suggested that they must be careful with toys as if they break we cannot necessarily go to the shop to replace it, one child kindly pointed out that he has money so it would be ok!
• creating lots of towers and buildings with wooden blocks and duplo
• beginning our book talk sessions. This involves the children listening to a short picture book and then taking it in turns to talk about their ideas. We began with 'owl babies'. One child suggested that the mother owl must have been getting worms for her babies, this was followed by a child lamenting that his grandparents apple had flies and worms in it. This was followed by another child talking about garden waste and the waste going in the dump truck to go to the tip! The children really did express their ideas, they also showed that they listen and incorporate others views when thinking. We are planning on making book talk a daily part of our routine in order to encourage a love of books along with improving speech and language development
• crafting with glue, paint, dabbers from the craft trolley....

...and many more activities! As usual the weekly blog represents a snapshot of what most of the children participate do during the week. Please speak to your childs key person if you would like to have further information about your childs interests and progress.

NOTICE: Chesterton Playgroup is now part of the Amazon smile campaign.
If you use the following link when you shop through Amazon the setting will be able to receive 0.5% of the profit. We would really appreciate your help and support with this. We have a wish list of items to purchase when we raise funds. We would also like to raise funds for a playgroup trip with the children. If we raise enough money this year it should be possible so please lend us your support!

Many thanks and have a lovely weekend.
Best wishes, Julia, Grace, Sharon, Lisa, Jackie and Amy