We're nearly ready for our half term break, and what a wonderful first half term we've had!

Our little ones have adjusted well to our new routines and are thoroughly enjoying all of our topics and activities.

Our most recent topic has been “Autumn”. We’ve been making the most of our outdoor time and discovering all the autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. Our messy tray has been full of lots of autumnal resources and textures and we have also been making pumpkin pictures, hammering golf tees into butternut squashes and using broccoli as our paint brushes to create autumn tree pictures. 

We are also looking at animals that hibernate as part of our autumn topic. Lots of children have spoken about hedgehogs, so we have been collecting lots of lovely natural resources to build hedgehog houses. Hedgehog has also been one of our words to learn in our weekly Makaton signing lessons.

While we’ve been outdoors, we’ve been looking out for conkers, pine cones and leaves, which are all great natural resources to use in preschool at this time of year. After half term we will be on more autumn walks where the children can get their listening ears on and listen out for the wonderful sounds of autumn such as crunching leaves, wind in the trees, splashy puddles and lots more.

Our weekly science experiments are still going strong – our favourite this half term has been creating lava lamps in wine glasses. The children loved watching the chemical reaction of oil, water, food colouring and alka seltzer - they enjoyed recreating the experiment by themselves too!

Coming up in our next half term we will be getting creative with clay when we celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and with bonfire night coming up we’ll be using lots of colour to create our own fireworks and will be exploring lots of sounds for firework night too.