It's hard to believe we’re now into our final term at Hatch Warren Under Fives!

Spring term was all about springtime – the children learnt all about the season of spring and all about baby farm animals too. In the lead up to the holidays we enjoyed lots of Easter activities, we made Easter bonnets and wreaths, painted eggs, made Easter nest cakes, found lots of eggs hidden around the garden and we even had a visit from the Easter bunny who arrived with a basket full of chocolate eggs for everyone.

We have created lots of different role play areas in our home corner over the last few weeks, but the children’s favourite has definitely been the farm shop. The children went shopping for carrots, onions and potatoes at the farm shop and then chopped them up to make a vegetable stew. The children have also been busy planting their own vegetables in the garden and growing spring flowers too.

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 been 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 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.

Parents can also support with the transition from preschool to primary school at home by introducing some fun and simple activities to support mathematics in the Early Years. For example you can:

• Make skittles with your little one, using plastic bottles.  Put numbers on the skittles. Play games where we have to keep score of how many skittles you have knocked down. Can your little one say what number was on the bottle they knocked down?

• Let your little one sort the clothes; ask them to put all the ones with the same pattern or colour together and tell you if they are red, spotty or stripy etc.

• Let your little one make a pattern with buttons or lids, like `big, small, big’.  How many patterns or groups can you find?  

These activities for home link with the Early Years Foundation Stage of mathematics whereby your little ones are beginning to count reliably with numbers, and say which number is one more or one less than a given number.  Also, your little ones begin to explore characteristics of everyday objects and shapes and use mathematical language to describe them.