What we've been doing

June 25

We are nearly at the end of another amazing year at Hatch Warren Under Fives.

Our older children have been focusing on school readiness and independence, ready to move up to school. They have been mark making, using number skills and counting in various ways, practicing taking shoes off and putting them on, using listening ears to follow instructions and we have been promoting lots of independence and self care.

For Father’s Day we welcomed our Dad’s into preschool for some treats and play time. The children loved showing Daddy around preschool.

We have also had fun in our annual sports day. The children competed in teams in our favourite traditional sports day races with parents cheering them on.

We are looking forward to celebrating the end of the year with a graduation ceremony and picnic for our older children and families. We wish all of our children leaving us this summer lots of luck and every success at school!

May 25

We are loving the sunshine this term at Hatch Warren Under Fives. The children are spending lots of time outdoors and are enjoying all of the areas in our garden.

We have a discovery den with all of the equipment needed to hunt and identify mini beasts from the garden. The children also have lots of opportunities to express themselves creatively in the garden and to use their fine and gross motor skills in our outdoor chalking and mark making area. We have a diggerland area and a construction area where the children put on high vis jackets and get to work building walls. We also bring our love of reading outdoors and have a cosy reading area to enjoy stories in the sunshine. And of course, a preschool garden would not be complete without a mud kitchen to make sticky mud pies and cakes.

We are putting lots of work into school readiness for our older children and each day we are having fun with activities to promote number recognition, personal and social skills, listening and understanding, health and self-care. We are also doing lots of small group activities to help with focus and turn taking.

For sensory we have had rice, shaving foam, sand, jelly and water play and we have used natural resources on the messy tray to create our own nature pizzas.

We had a very crafty week for VE day and made medals and war planes and decorated bunting and flags – the children then raced their war paper aeroplanes against each other.

APRIL 25

After a lovely Easter break, we are now back for the final full term at Hatch Warren Under Fives, and we have the added excitement of finding out which schools our older children are going to!

In the lead up to the holidays we enjoyed lots of Easter activities with lots of arts and crafts. We also played basketball, enjoyed some waterplay, set up a nail salon, made obstacle courses in the garden and built brick walls in the construction site.

Now that the weather is better, we are spending lots more time in the garden and will be looking for mini beasts; we link this in with our life cycles topic. We have mini a mini beast shed in the garden where we have identification posters. The children love hunting for snails, worms, beetles and even spiders and they use magnifying glasses, binoculars, clip boards and pencils.

As we are now in our final term, this is when our “school readiness’ begins! We will begin to introduce lots of activities to prepare our bigger children for school, 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.

March 25

We have enjoyed our spring term. Amongst our usual activities, there has been World Book Day, pancake day, Mother’s Day, Red Nose Day, Ramadan, St Patricks Day, Holi and all of our Easter activities too

During World Book Day week the children came into preschool dressed as their favourite characters. We shared some great stories, including super worm, funny bones and the selfish crocodile. The children were very creative and designed their own book covers for our favourite books.

We celebrate Holi Hindi each year at preschool, a colourful ancient Hindu festival to welcome the arrival of spring and celebrate the end of winter. This is our most colourful week at preschool and we use lots of bright colours, splat paint and make colourful pictures.

The children created lovely cards for Mother’s Day and we are now in the lead up to Easter and have lost of special creations underway; we will of course have a little bit of chocolate too!

At this time of year we get busy in the garden and we start to spend more time outdoors, looking for signs of spring. We have been enjoying the sunshine and the children have been busy with water play and obstacle courses.

Our older children will be learning which primary school they are going to over the Easter holidays, so we are eagerly awaiting to hear the big news when we get back to preschool after the holidays. Next term we begin our preparations for the transition to big school. We will start by giving the children lots of mark making opportunities and activities that strengthen little hands for handwriting.

February 25

We recently celebrated Chinese New Year at Hatch Warren Under Fives. It is the year of the snake, so the children made colourful snakes on the craft table and played some snake games. We gave the children chop sticks so they could practise picking them up noodles and filling little bowls, great for using our fine motor skills and we had some Chinese treats on the snack table. At the end of the day the children all chose fortune cookies to take home with them.

We have introduced lots of sensory play this term, the children are enjoying everything from messy trays to chasing bubbles each day. We are also enjoying lots of story time this term and have focused on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three Little Pigs, Elmer and Stickman, we plan lots of activities around each book using arts and crafts, role play and learning about shapes and numbers.

The children made some lovely cards for Valentine’s day and we also practiced our number recognition with a Valentines theme by using playing cards and looking at the numbers on the hearts cards.

Coming up next month is World Book Day, we love sharing books with the children and are planning a wonderful week celebrating our favourite books with opportunities for the children to get involved with lots of fabulous stories throughout the week. We will also be celebrating Pancake Day, St David’s Day and St Patrick’s Day, and of course we will be making some special treats for Mother’s Day.

We are continuing with our small group work each week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills, science experiments, dough gym, yoga and makaton signing.

January 25, Happy New Year!

The children at Hatch Warren Under Fives have enjoyed getting back into the preschool routine after the Christmas break and we have welcomed new children who have settled in brilliantly. The first week was all about getting back into routine and playing with friends.

There has been lots of excitement with the weather so we have been wrapping up warm and getting outside to play. The children have been playing with ice that we have made by filling up our trays with water, it makes a great ice rink for our toy animals the next day. We have also been lucky enough to get a little dusting of snow to play in. The snow inspired the children to create their own snowmen on the craft tables, they made beautiful snowman pictures and some very fluffy cotton wool snowman models. The colder weather is also the perfect time to encourage the children’s growing independence. They have practised putting on their own scarves, hats, gloves and wellies before going outside.

February will be a busy month for us with lots of fun to look forward to. We have Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year and Pancake Day coming up.

November 24

The countdown to Christmas is now on at Hatch Warren Under Fives. Preschool is full of glitter, sparkles and singing and we are busy planning our Christmas party where we will have fun and games before we go to visit Santa in his magical grotto.

It’s been a busy half term and we have been celebrating some special occasions including fireworks, Diwali and Remembrance Day. The children made clay Diwali tea light holders, they danced like fireworks with colourful streamers and listened to the story of 5th November. We used lots of colour and textures to create wonderful firework pictures and we made lovely poppy craft for Remembrance Day.

We joined in with Children in Need in November, we did some Pudsey inspired activities through the week and invited the children to dress up their favourite fun clothes and the staff came to preschool dressed up too.

We have been tracing letters and practicing writing names with our older children and are continuing with our small group work each week including Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills, science experiments and makaton signing. We have also been making yummy Christmas goodies to eat!

October 2024

We have had a great first half term at Hatch Warren Under Fives, finishing up with a week full of Halloween fun.

The children have been very creative with pumpkins and have painted them, modelled them and they have even pulled them apart to enjoyed the sensory experience of feeling what was inside. We have seen lots of Halloween costumes and colours in preschool for our Halloween theme week too.

During our time outdoors we have been introducing the children to autumn colours, patterns and we’ve been paying close attention to the changes that we see as the seasons change. While we’ve been out on our Autumn walks, we’ve also been looking out for conkers, pine cones, twigs and leaves, which are all great natural resources to use in preschool at this time of year. The children always make lovely seasonal artwork with our natural resources. They have also been practising their fine motor skills and pegging the leaves they have collected on our washing line.

The children have shown lots of interest in space so we’ve had a space week and made a giant rocket which the children could take turns to launch to the moon. In our role play areas we have created a new ice cream station – the children have really enjoyed using their imaginations and serving every flavour ice cream you could possibly think of.

One of the most important parts of our daily routine is reading and story time. The children have so many favourite stories so we have introduced a fun voting system and the children vote for which story they would like to hear each day.

In our Caterpillars room, our two-year-olds also enjoyed a space theme and went for rides in a rocket ship that they made from a huge cardboard box. They have also been going on autumn walks to look for seasonal treasures and have been enjoying lots of sensory activities including a farm with rice, waffle cones and chocolate powder, modelling with wonderful smelling cinnamon playdough, exploring chickpea foam and water painting on the garden walls,

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 colours to create our own firework pictures and will be exploring lots of sounds.

September 24, a new year at preschool!

It's been a lovely start to a new year at preschool. Some new friendships have been made and our little ones have settled in brilliantly.

This year we have introduced a new room for our increasing number of two year olds. Our “Caterpillars’ room is a smaller environment for our younger children and prepares them for their graduation into our much bigger “Butterflies” room when they turn 3. In the caterpillars room we have been looking at mini beasts and the children have made their own mini beasts from playdough and been bug hunting in the garden, we found lots of worms and lots of beetles. We have also been having fun with nursery rhymes and making our own accompanying music by shaking pasta in different sized pots and pans.

In our bigger “Butterfiles” room the children have been getting to know more about each other and have made some lovely self portraits to share with everyone. We have introduced the story of the Colour Monster, which explains all about our emotions and how it makes us feel. The children have started self registration each day and they can sign in next to an emotion emoji so that we can see how they are feeling every day. One of our highlights of the term has been our paper aeroplane making and racing!

We have also been making the most of the weather and our outdoor time and discovering all the autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. We will soon start to think about animals that hibernate as part of our autumn topic.

Inside we have our home corner, where the children can enjoy a variety of role-play, dressing up and reading every day. We are putting an emphasis on encouraging our children’s interest in books and offering lots of different reading areas, including a reading den outside.

June 24

We are nearly at the end of another amazing year at Hatch Warren Under Fives.

We have had a busy few weeks and have been focusing on school readiness and independence for our older children – we have been mark making, using our number skills and counting in various ways, practicing taking shoes off and putting them on, using listening ears to follow instructions and promoting independence and self care.

We have had D-Day this term and the children made aeroplanes and medals and we joined in with World Ocean Day and decorated sea creatures and mermaids. We have also had a visit from the lollipop lady for child safety week to talk about staying safe on the roads.

The children got very busy for Father’s Day and created so many lovely cards and pictures and they decorated cakes to take home too. The children have also been getting involved with lots of jobs around preschool, we have introduced a daily “Helpers Board” and the children are loving helping the adults with important jobs like preparing snack, tidying and helping with the garden.

And of course the children have been talking about the Euro’s so we have set up new goals for penalty shootouts, we’ve made bunting, football pictures and flags of all the different countries.

Some fun to finish up the year will be our sports day in July, we will have the blue, purple and green team in the traditional sports day races of egg and spoon, running races and the sack race. We’re expecting lots of cheering from our parents!

We are looking forward to celebrating the end of the year with a graduation ceremony and picnic for our children and families. We wish all of our children leaving us this summer lots of luck and every success at school!

May 24

We are loving the sunshine this term at Hatch Warren Under Fives. The children are spending lots of time outdoors and are enjoying all of the areas in our garden. The new discovery den is very popular and the children are using the mini beast check list and magnifying glasses to identify lots of bugs and mini beasts from the garden.

The children also have lots of opportunities to express themselves creatively in the garden and to use their fine and gross motor skills in our outdoor chalking and mark making area. Our love of reading at Hatch Warren Under Fives has been brought outdoors and the children also spend time relaxing in the cosy reading area. And of course, a preschool garden would not be complete without a mud kitchen to make sticky mud pies and cakes.

For sensory play the children have been running an ice cream parlour and have been building ice creams with cones, shaving foam and pom poms. We have also had rice, sand, jelly and water play and we have used natural resources on the messy tray to create our own nature pizzas.

Our construction area has been taken over by marble runs – the children are building impressive runs and discovering whose marble goes the fastest.

In the craft area this term the children have been marble painting, golf ball painting and creating beautiful caterpillar pictures.

APRIL 24

After a lovely Easter break we are now back for the final full term at Hatch Warren Under Fives. In the lead up to the holidays we enjoyed lots of Easter activities with arts and crafts, Easter egg trails and an Easter raffle too.

Our children love mini beasts so we are currently creating a mini beasts shed for the garden. We have put our Easter fundraising money towards magnifying glasses, binoculars, clip boards, pencils, mini beast identification posters and other resources to make our mini beast shed a really fun area for the children to engage and learn in.

Now that the weather is getting better we will be spending lots more time in the garden looking for mini beasts and we will start to look to link this in with our life cycles topic.

We have recently heard the very exciting news of which schools our older children will be going to in September, so now our “school readiness’ begins! We will begin to introduce lots of activities to prepare our bigger children for school, 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.

March24

Spring term at Hatch Warren Under Fives has kept us very busy; there has been World Book Day, Mother’s Day, Red Nose Day, Ramadan, St Patricks Day, Holi and all of our Easter activities too.

During World Book Day week the children came into preschool dressed as their favourite characters. We had a visit from Mary Poppins, a beautiful butterfly, a dinosaur, a giant shark and many more amazing characters. We also adapted our what’s in the box game to what’s in Mary Poppins bag for world book day. We have been doing lots of reading this term and inviting the children to bring their favourite books from home to read. We’ve shared some great stories, including super worm, funny bones and the selfish crocodile. The children were very creative and designed their own book covers for our favourite books.

We watched a short programme on cbeebies to help the children understand Ramadan, we learnt all about fasting and made some lovely craft lanterns. We also celebrated Holi, the Hindu Festival of Colour. We had a fun week using our brightest paints, doing lots of messy splatting and making colourful pictures.

At this time of year we get busy in the garden and we start to spend more time outdoors, looking for signs of spring. We will soon be planting spring flowers and vegetables in our planters.

In the lead up to Easter the children are enjoying lots of arts and crafts, an Easter egg trail in the garden and of course a little bit of chocolate too.

February 24

We have been celebrating Chinese New Year and the children made colourful dragon masks and they also made a big dragons head and then danced around the room. We practiced cutting skills making paper lanterns, which the children decorated with lots of glitter, and they made their own special fried rice by adding carrots and pepper, which they cut up themselves. In our Chinese tuff tray we created noodles from wool and shredded paper and gave the children chop sticks for them to practise picking them up and filling little bowls.

Still on the theme of food, we also enjoyed pancakes for Pancake Day and the children decided that their favourite toppings were chocolate, sugar and blueberries. We also rolled out some play dough pancakes and made our own play dough toppings.

For Valentine’s week we had a red, white and pink week and invited the children to wear Valentine coloured clothes into preschool. The craft tables were very busy all week with the children making lots of lovely cards to take home and to practice our number recognition we used a giant pack of playing cards and looked at the numbers on the hearts cards.

As always there has been plenty of time outdoors and we have been collecting lots of natural outdoor resources with the children to use for arts and crafts in preschool. We have had some chilly days so the children decided to turn their ice cream station in the garden into a hot chocolate station, which they have served with marshmallows and cream. Yum!

We enjoy sharing our love of books with the children, so we always love World Book Day in March. We are planning a wonderful week celebrating our favourite books and will be encouraging the children to get involved with lots of fabulous stories throughout the week. We will also be celebrating Pancake Day, St David’s Day and St Patrick’s Day, and of course we will be making some special treats for Mother’s Day.

We are continuing with our small group work each week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; we are having fun with our science experiments, dough gym, yoga and makaton signing.

January 24 - Happy New Year!

It’s been a wonderful start to 2024 at Hatch Warren Under Fives. The children have enjoyed getting back into the preschool routine and we have welcomed new children who have settled in brilliantly.

We started the year by reintroducing the story of the Colour Monster at group times. It’s a fantastic book that helps the children to recognise and talk about how they are feeling. The children have helped us update our display boards by making some lovely new artwork and we have also been focusing on “All About Me” to help get to know the interests of the children so we can plan our activities moving forward. Our book of the week is currently The Smartest Giant in Town, the story teaches us about kindness and generosity and the children have loved joining in with the rhyming words. We have been playing the listening game of sound bingo so we can focus on the children’s recognition of sounds, and we have also been busy with number recognition work using locks and keys.

February will be a busy month for us with lots of fun to look forward to. We have Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year and Pancake Day coming up.

December 2023

We finished off 2023 with a lovely Christmassy month at Hatch Warren Under Fives. The children decorated our tree, did lots of Christmas craft and sang lots of Christmas songs! The last day of term was a Christmas party for all of the children – complete with a visit from Father Christmas.

After the break we are looking forward to the new year at preschool when all the children excitedly talk about their holidays and what presents they got for Christmas. Every January we see children recreating some of their favourite Christmas memories through their play, such as Christmas cake making, laying the tables for dinners with family, and wrapping presents, just like Mummy does! This links perfectly to the Department for Education's "Early Year's Outcomes" which says that a typical child should be able to "remember and talk about significant events in their own experiences" and "recognise and describe special times or events for family or friends".

November 2023

It’s full steam ahead to Christmas at Hatch Warren Under Fives and preschool is full of glitter, sparkles and singing. We are on the very exciting countdown to our Christmas party where we will have fun and games before Santa joins us for a Christmas sing-a-long and visits to his magical grotto.

It’s been a fun half term at preschool and we have been celebrating some special occasions – including fireworks, Diwali and Remembrance Day. The children made clay Diwali tea light holders and decorated them with lots of colour and glitter. We also used lots of colour and textures to create wonderful firework pictures and we used our hands for our Remembrance Day creations, making beautiful fingerprint poppy pictures and a wreath using our handprints.

We joined in with Children in Need in November, we did some Pudsey inspired activities and invited the children to dress up their favourite fun clothes and the staff came to preschool dressed up too.

We are continuing with our “Book of the Week” and coming up we have “We are Going on a Bear Hunt”. This is one of our favourites and we have a great time going on our own bear hunt in preschool.

As always, we have our regular activities each week which are Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; science experiments and makaton signing. We have also been cooking up some yummy Christmas goodies on our cooking and baking days.

October 2023, our first half term...

We have had a great first half term at Hatch Warren Under Fives – some lovely new friendships have been made and our little ones have had fun getting to know each other.

We have been making the most of our time outdoors discovering autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. While we’ve been outdoors, we’ve been looking out for conkers, pine cones, twigs and leaves, which are all great natural resources to use in preschool at this time of year. The children have made some lovely seasonal artwork and they observed that the woods look like where the Gruffalo lives.

The children have shown lots of interest in pirates and superheroes. Following the interest in pirates we made an obstacle course in the garden where the children could walk the plank. We made pirate flags and hats on the craft table and we read the brilliant book “Pirates love underpants”. The children also went on a treasure hunt in our messy trays and dug in the rice for some treasure. For our superhero theme we talked about super powers – the children decided they would most like super speed and invisibility powers. They also made some amazing superhero masks.

In the role-play area we have created a vets and a doctors surgery. The children have been amazing at looking after each other and using the stethoscope and thermometer to check if they are well or poorly. Our tool station has also been very popular and the children have been busy around preschool doing some DIY and fixing things.

We like to encourage healthy eating at preschool, so we have been making smoothies with the children. Chopping the bananas, apples, strawberries and berries is a great way to exercise the children’s fine motor skills and then they used a blender to mix everything up into smoothies to serve at snack time.

Our Halloween week was a chance to get creative with pumpkins and the children dressed up in Halloween colours and costumes all week too. The children particularly enjoyed the sensory experience of pulling apart pumpkins and feeling what was inside, they talked about the slimy texture of the seeds. After scooping out the seeds the children made birdfeeders with the shell, adding bird food and lard and squashing it into the pumpkins. The children have hung the feeders in the garden and have been enjoying watching the birds come to feed.

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

September 2023 - Welcome to a new academic year!

The first few weeks of a new term are always about settling in and helping our children make new friends and get to know staff. It's lovely to welcome new faces and to welcome back our returning children.

This year we have introduced a new book, The Colour Monster, to the children. It’s a wonderful book that uses colours to help children understand about emotions and how to talk about how they are feeling, so we can revisit the book with the children and it helps us to know how they are feeling as they settle into a new preschool and into a new routine.

Our first topic “All About Me” is a great chance for the children to learn all about themselves, their new friends and their families, including talking about pets, favourite colours, favourite foods and lots more. We use stories, arts, crafts and songs to help our children discover what is unique and special about themselves and each other.

As the weather has been good we have been using our outdoor learning environment as much as possible and we have some great activities planned for extending our children’s learning outdoors. We’ll also be learning about autumn this term and exploring colours, outdoor sounds and hibernating animals. And we’ll be holding weekly cooking sessions and weekly science experiments too.

June 2023

We are into the final term of another amazing year at Hatch Warren Under Fives.

We have had a busy few weeks and have been focusing on school readiness and independence for our older children – we have been mark making, using our number skills and counting in various ways, using listening ears to follow instructions and promoting independence and self care.

The weather has been amazing, so we have spent lots of time in the garden. The children have enjoyed chalking and they love using water and paint brushes to paint the garden walls.

Our preschool sports day was a big success, the parents came in to cheer on our teams in the egg and spoon, sack race and running race. We also had a "bring your Dad to preschool" day for a Father’s day treat.

We are now getting ready for our graduation celebration next month!

May 2023

The highlight of this month has of course been the King’s Coronation. We used lots of red, white and blue in our play and the children made wonderful jewelled crowns and coronation window decorations. We had a special snack time fit for a King, with jam sandwiches, strawberries and cakes, and the children finished off the week with music, balloons, face painting and parachute games. The children chose to continue our theme of special celebrations and decorated pictures of cakes and made lots of sparkly artwork. They also worked together to build a castle, just like the Kings.

We often see the children playing babies at preschool, so we have introduced a baby role-play corner. The children have been taking it in turns to walk the babies in the pushchairs, they have been putting the babies to bed in the moses baskets and feeding the babies. They have even been changing nappies!

Now that the weather is brightening up, the children are spending more time outside and enjoying the garden. We are creating lots of new outside areas for the children including a new outdoor area for mark making, a new outdoor cosy reading area and a new and improved water play area.

We are also starting to put lots of work into school readiness for our older children and each day we will be have fun with activities to promote number recognition, personal and social skills, listening and understanding, health and self care to name a few.

April 2023

We have been doing lots of activities based around our new book, the Story of the Colour Monster. This book is a really fun way to explore colours and feelings and for the children to understand more about emotions and how they can change through the day. We experimented with a new way for the children to sign in each morning and instead of just choosing between happy and sad they picked colours to show us if they are angry (red), scared (black), sad (blue), calm (green), loved (pink) or happy (yellow).

We have recently heard the very exciting news of which schools our older children will be going to in September. This is our final term of the year at Hatch Warren Under Fives and this is when our “school readiness’ begins. We will begin to introduce lots of activities to prepare our bigger children for school, 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.

March 2023

We have enjoyed our spring term at Hatch Warren Under Fives. Amongst our usual activities, there has been sunshine, snow, books, pancakes, Mother’s Day and we are now in the countdown to Easter.

We recently celebrated Mother’s Day and the children made beautiful cards and welcomed Mummies and Nannies into preschool to play.

We have also had fun this term celebrating Pancake Day, we flipped pancakes and we ate a lot too.

Holi Hindi is one of our annual celebrations; this colourful ancient Hindu festival welcomes the arrival of spring and celebrates the end of winter. Ironically this year it brought lots of snow with it! We had a great time playing in the snow and the children enjoyed splatting lots of bright paint.

We celebrated World Book Day this month and dressed up as our favourite book characters. We had lots of lovely costumes and characters in preschool. We also really enjoyed reading the children’s favourite books with them. We have recently been reading “Dear Zoo” as our book of the week. This book has inspired lots of interest in animals. We have spoken a lot about our pets at home and how to look after them and we have opened our very own vets in the role-play corner.

At this time of year we get busy in the garden too, the children have given us ideas of what they’d like to grow so we’ll soon be busy planting vegetables and flowers.

We are now in the lead up to Easter and enjoying lots of Easter arts and crafts, we also have an Easter egg trail in the garden with chocolate eggs to find!

February 2023

February is aways a busy month with lots of activities for the children - we have activities based around Lunar New Year, pancake day and Valentine's Day.

For Lunar New Year we turned our role-play area into a Chinese restaurant and tasted lots of different Chinese foods. The children practised their mark making by taking food orders, they worked on their fine motor skills by experimenting with chopsticks and the best part is that they ate lots of yummy new Chinese foods.

Valentines week was all about crafts and card making and the children also made love heart jam sandwiches for snack time. On pancake week we did pancake racing and eating pancakes for snack!

As always there has been plenty of time outdoors and we have been collecting lots of natural outdoor resources with the children to use for arts and crafts in preschool. We are also keeping an eye on our spring bulbs in the garden and getting very muddy in the mud kitchen. Our science experiment on floating and sinking was very popular and it kept the children busy finding their own resources to test the floating and sinking theory. We have also introduced a new game of sound bingo where the children use their listening skills to guess the sounds.

Over the last week we have been enjoying lots of activities based around our book of the week “Supertato”. The children made superheroes from potatoes, they made superhero masks, painted and printed with vegetables and they cut potatoes up into chips, which aids the development of fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. The next book of the week, as voted by the children, will be “Peppa Pig”.

January 2023 - Happy New Year!

It’s the start to a brand new year, the children have settled back into the routine brilliantly after the holidays and we have welcomed some new children who are really enjoying their introduction to preschool.

We are focusing on books and comprehension this term, we have been exploring words and rhymes, following pictures and predicting what will happen next and asking the children questions about the story. Our “Books of the Week” this term, voted by the children, have been The Gruffalo and Stickman. In addition to our reading comprehension activities the children have enjoyed lots of lovely crafts based around the books, we’ve also extended the stories into our baking and making sessions and have iced and decorated some amazing Gruffalo biscuits. Our next book of the week will be The Dancing Dragon – a perfect start to Chinese New Year and part of the Gigi And the Giant Ladle series which is written by a local Basingstoke author.

We have a new arrival at Preschool, Theo the Travelling Teddy. The children take Theo home for the week then share his diary of adventures when he returns to preschool. He has been a big hit!

December 2022 - Happy Christmas!

December is our magical term of glitter and sparkle at Hatch Warren Under Fives Preschool, this month is all about having fun with all things Christmas.

We have decorated trees, made lots of Christmas craft and sung lots of Christmas songs. We will be finishing the year with a lovely Christmas party for the children where we’ll have a special visitor popping in to our Christmas grotto. The children will also be performing “Twas the Night Before Christmas” for our families.

Wishing you all a Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year!

November 2022

There has been lots of fun and colour this term – including fireworks and Diwali. The children made clay Diwali tea light holders and we used lots of colour and textures to create some wonderful firework pictures.

The children made beautiful poppy prints and they learnt all about the meaning of Remembrance Day and real life heroes, they also joined in with a minute’s silence and did an incredible job.

We have spent lots of time on outdoor walks in the woods looking at the seasonal changes, listening to the sounds of crunching leaves and wind in the trees and collecting lovely natural resources to use in preschool.

We joined in with Children in Need in November, we did lots of Pudsey inspired activities with the children and we also invited everyone to dress up their favourite fun clothes and the staff came to preschool dressed up too.

We took part in world nursery rhyme week, which celebrates the importance of nursery rhymes in early childhood development; we had a fantastic visit from a fire engine and the firemen told the children all about the special clothes they wear and how important their job is.

We are continuing with our “Book of the Week”. The children vote for a book each week and we have activities based around the book – so far we have read Stickman and Goldilocks. The children created their own amazing stick families with sticks and twigs from their outdoor walks and they loved tasting porridge and trying different size chairs!

Our small group work each week includes Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; we are still having fun with our science experiments and makaton signing. Coming up next is the month of glitter and sparkles and all things Christmas!

November 22

October 2022

We’ve had a great first half term at Hatch Warren Under Fives – some lovely new friendships have been made and our little ones have had fun getting to know each other.

Our topic this half term has been autumn. We’ve been making the most of the weather and have spent lots of time outdoors discovering autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. While we’ve been outdoors, we’ve been looking out for conkers, pine cones, twigs and leaves, which are all great natural resources to use in preschool at this time of year. We have made lovely autumn pictures in the art area and we have also been looking at animals that hibernate as part of our autumn topic. Lots of children have spoken about hedgehogs, so we have been using the leaves the children have collected as part of an experiment where we use hot water bottles and leaves to demonstrate hibernation.

October is Black History Month, so the children have been celebrating a range of different cultures and have been making African masks, decorating baskets, dancing and playing musical instruments. We have also been encouraging the children to talk about how we are all different. What are our houses like? Who makes up our family? What is my hair and eye colour? What colour skin do I have? We have some lovely new books and resources to share with the children on these subjects.

In the role play area we have created a hairdresser and barber shop and the children have been working on their fine motor skills cutting and designing hair styles (using spaghetti!). We have also been placing a big importance on reading and enjoying books and stories, so we have been placing books in lots of areas around the room which has worked really well with encouraging the children to pick up books more often.

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.

September 2022

We love the start of a new academic year at Hatch Warren Under Fives – it’s lovely to see how much our returning children have grown over the summer holidays and it’s always wonderful to meet our new children too.

Our first few weeks are always about settling in and helping our children make new friends and get to know staff. All children are individuals, and while some children will adjust fairly easily and quickly to a new environment and new routines, others will take longer to feel comfortable and secure. At Hatch Warren Under Fives we work hard to ensure that all children settle happily.

Our first topic “All About Me” is a great chance for the children to learn all about themselves, their new friends and their families. We use stories, arts, crafts and songs to help our children discover what is unique and special about themselves and each other.

As the weather is still good we have been using our outdoor learning environment as much as possible and we have some great activities planned for extending our children’s learning outdoors. We’ll also be learning about autumn this term and exploring colours, outdoor sounds and hibernating animals. And we’ll be holding weekly cooking sessions and weekly science experiments too.

We have welcomed two wonderful and very experienced members of staff this year. Pam Jones has joined us as Manager and Jenny Ward has joined us as an Early Years Practitioner.

September 22

June 2022

The year has flown at Hatch Warren Under Fives and it’s nearly time to say goodbye to our children leaving for primary school. They’ve all gained so much confidence and independence and are completely ready for their next exciting adventure… But we’ve still got lots more fun to squeeze into our final few weeks!

We’ve had some fabulous weather lately that led our children to think about holidays. We set up a travel agent shop in our role-play area and found lots of exciting places to visit on our world maps. Our little ones were very busy packing suitcases with clothes they will need for hot and cold holidays. Outside, in traditional seaside style, they got the buckets and spades out and played in the sand and water trays. The children also made post cards and ice creams and created their very own passports.

We also celebrated Father’s Day with our “Bring your Dad to Preschool” week. It was lovely to see lots of Dads, Grandads and other important male carers accompanying their children into preschool, and the children enjoyed serving them up a special Father’s Day treat of doughnuts at snack time.

In a few weeks time our older children will be leaving us for their next adventures at primary school, so we are looking forward to celebrating their time at preschool with a Graduation party.

TRANSITION

Very soon many of the children will be moving on to their new “big” schools. It’s an exciting time but we should remember that change is difficult for us all. At Hatch Warren Under Fives we do our best to support the children and help them through the transitions into new schools. Research suggests that transitions are central to young children’s development and emotional well being, and the way in which the first transitions are handled could have a significant impact on the child’s capacity to cope with change in the short and long term. At Hatch Warren Under Fives we support the transition process in a range of ways. We help to prepare a child for school by liaising closely with the schools, working with our families, taking the views of the child into account and providing 'school-like' experiences. What is very important to remember is that TRANSITION IS A PROCESS NOT A SINGLE EVENT.

May 2022

We are now heading into the final stretch of the preschool year at Hatch Warren Under Fives. Up until the end of term we are putting lots of work into school readiness for our older children and each day we will be having fun with activities to promote number recognition, personal and social skills, listening and understanding, health and self care to name a few.

During our recent pet theme we created a vets surgery in the role-play area and the children dressed up as doctors and nurses and took care of the animals, teddies and dinosaurs. The children were also very good at matching up pet foods to animals; they particularly enjoyed looking at mealworms and correctly matched them to lizards and birds. They also learnt the Makaton signs for cat, dog, guinea pig and horse.

On the craft tables we used faux fur to create mouse and cat collage pictures. The children also used their fine motor skills to draw the animals they would like as a pet, the most popular was a dinosaur!

We plan our themes around the children’s interests each week, so coming up we will be having dinosaur week – which is sure to be a favourite.

In the Garden Room our theme is the Gruffalo. As well as listening to the story of the Gruffalo and re-creating the story with our puppets, the children have been very creative with making Gruffalo faces with rice cakes, cream cheese and different fruits and vegetables. Next up in the Garden Room will be Jack and the Beanstalk so we’ll be growing beans and measuring big and small.

April 2022

This term the children learnt all about the season of spring and all about life cycles. In the lead up to the holidays we enjoyed lots of Easter activities, including Easter cooking and Easter egg hunts through the woods. We have also been hard at work in the garden and the children have been planting seeds and looking after the herb garden.

As part of our life cycles topic we have been growing our own butterflies. It’s very exciting that the caterpillars have now changed into cocoons so we think we’re close to hatching our butterflies. The children have also been using the laptop to research the lifecycle of a caterpillar and compare what they have learnt online with what they have seen with our real life caterpillars at preschool.

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 always 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.

March 2022

We’ve been enjoying the brighter weather and are making plans for some gardening. The children have given us ideas of what they’d like to grow so we’ll soon be busy planting vegetables and flowers.

We recently celebrated Mother’s Day and the children made beautiful cards. We have also had fun celebrating pancake day, St David’s Day, St Patrick’s Day and Holi Hindu. We are now in the lead up to Easter and enjoying lots of Easter arts and crafts and egg hunts in the garden.

The role-play corner has been set up for camping this month, which has been a huge hit with the children. And staying with the theme of the great outdoors we have been learning all about mini beasts – and hunting for them! We have been on walks through the woods uncovering logs and leaves to see if we can discover any little mini beasts hiding. As part of their mini beast topic the children painted symmetrical butterfly pictures, they have used their fine motor skills to trace the names and shapes of spiders and worms, they have counted spots on ladybirds and made their own ladybirds using clay. The children also used cardboard boxes to create their own bug house.

Our small group work has been focussed on maths and phonics. We have been identifying numerals, looking at simple adding and subtracting and learning to read number sentences. In our small group phonics work we have been listening to the initial sound in a word and matching it to a letter.

February 2022

It’s been lovely to see the signs of spring appearing at Hatch Warren Under Fives – we’re making the most of being outdoors and the children have been great detectives and really taken notice of the seasonal changes in the garden. They have pointed out new leaves on trees and we’re starting to see some flowers coming through too. We’re looking forward to doing our own bit of gardening later this term and planting some spring bulbs.

It’s been a busy month at preschool, we’ve collected materials from our woodland walks to make bird houses and bird feeders and we’ve also been doing a spot of bird watching; we’ve looked at our favourite foods and made pitta pizzas with all of our favourite toppings; we created an erupting volcano in our science experiment, which the children loved and we’ve had a super hero inspired week too.

This month we also celebrated Chinese New Year and Valentines Day, as well as children’s mental health and wellbeing week.

For Chinese New Year we turned our role-play area into a Chinese restaurant. The prawn crackers and sweet and sour dip was much more popular than the egg fried rice! The children performed a special dragon dance to traditional Chinese music wearing masks of all the animals from the story of Chinese New Year. We also had a visit from a local author, Leanne Edney, who grew up in Kempshott. She read her new book “The Dancing Dragon” from the Gigi and the Giant Ladle series. It was a lovely end to Chinese New Year for the children.

January 2022 - Happy New Year!

It was lovely to welcome the children back to Hatch Warren Under Fives after the Christmas break and to hear about their adventures and their Christmas presents. We also welcomed some new children into preschool who have all settled in brilliantly.

Last term we spent time looking at winter and the seasons, so all of our outdoor activities this term will continue to enhance our children’s understanding of the world with more weather and seasons activities in the garden and on our walks. We are also continuing to encourage the children’s growing independence by practicing putting on scarves, hats, gloves and wellies before going outside.

We’ve had fun with the role play area this term – the children really enjoyed our doctors surgery. The children could tell us how they were feeling and we also learnt all about body parts – for example identifying a heart and placing it in the right area of a doll’s body.

December 2021 - Happy Christmas from all at Hatch Warren Under Fives

It's been a busy December - a magical month of glitter and sparkle at Hatch Warren Under Fives. We've had Christmas songs, Christmas tree decorating, crafting, baking...

And we finished the year with a lovely Christmas party for the children where we also had a very special visitor to our Christmas grotto.

Wishing you all a restful and Happy Christmas and we're looking forward to seeing you all in the New Year!

November 2021

This half term we’ve been exploring the season of autumn and have spent lots of time on outdoor walks in the woods looking at autumn colours, listening to autumn sounds and collecting lovely natural resources to use in preschool.

November was full of fun and colour – we started off with fireworks and Diwali. The children made clay Diwali tea light holders and we used lots of colour and textures to create some wonderful firework pictures, we also made edible sparklers using breadsticks, melted chocolate and sprinkles – yum!

The children made beautiful poppy prints and they learnt all about the meaning of Remembrance Day, they also joined in with a two-minute silence and did an incredible job.

We helped raise some money for Children in Need in November, and we had a lovely week in preschool doing lots of Pudsey inspired activities with the children. We also invited everyone to dress up through the week in their favourite fun clothes and the staff came to preschool dressed in pyjamas, yellow and red.

We also celebrated road safety week and had a visit from a road safety professional who told us all about crossing the road safely. And for anti bullying week, we invited everyone to wear odd socks for group time. Wearing odd socks shows we are all unique and it is OK to be different in a positive and fun way.

We are continuing with our small group work each week with Write Dance, a super fun session and a fantastic way to build motor skills and introduce writing skills; we are still having fun with our science experiments and makaton signing. And next week on the baking table we will be making some yummy Christmas goodies as we enter the month of glitter, sparkles and all things Christmas!

October 2021

We’ve had a great first half term at Hatch Warren Under Fives – some lovely new friendships have been made and our little ones have been getting to know each other with our “All About Me” topic. We’ve also been learning about autumn.

We’ve been making the most of the weather and our outdoor time and discovering all the autumn colours, patterns and the changes that we see in the environment as the seasons change. 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. We’ve used some of these resources to create our own lovely tree pictures. 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.

Animals that hibernate are part of our autumn term topic. Lots of children have spoken about hedgehogs, so we have been collecting lots of natural resources and old cardboard boxes to build hedgehog and animal houses. Hedgehog has also been one of our words to learn in our weekly Makaton signing lessons.

In our All About Me topic the children bought in family photos which we displayed around the room and the children told us all about their families. We also learnt about each other’s favourite things and what we liked and what we disliked.

We are still busy with our weekly sessions of dough gym, write dance, makaton signing, yoga and cooking and our science experiments are still going strong too.

September 2021 - Welcome to a new year at Hatch Warren Under Fives!

So far we have discovered that dinosaurs, Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol are firm favourites with the children, we’ve also spent time in the garden and the mud kitchen, water tray and climbing wall are proving very popular garden activities.

As the weather is still good we will be using our outdoor learning environment as much as possible and we have some great activities planned for extending our children’s learning outdoors. We’ll also be learning about autumn this term and exploring colours, outdoor sounds and hibernating animals. And we’ll be holding weekly cooking sessions and weekly science experiments too.

This year we have introduced ‘in the moment’ planning. This involves us seizing the moments when children show interest and curiosity in something by immediately supporting their next steps. We watch what our little ones are doing in the moment, we can then link it with their interests and help move their learning on. For example, at the end of the summer term children were talking about classrooms and starting school, we seized this opportunity to extend their interest in school life by changing our role-play area into a school. Staff were able to engage with children by following and supporting their interest and extend their learning experience. On activity was mark making in a register – this can encourage a child who is not usually interested in putting pencil to paper to engage with these activities when their interests are extended ‘in the moment’.

July 2021

It's been a wonderful year at Hatch Warren Under Fives. We enjoyed a lovely graduation ceremony and picnic on the field for our children moving up to big school. We wish them the very best of luck in their new adventures - and look forward to seeing our returning children in September and meeting our new faces too.

Enjoy the summer holidays!

June 2021

There has been a lot happening this term. Our older children have been focusing on school readiness and independence. We’ve also had some fabulous weather to enjoy time in the garden, which gave us the idea to make our own beach and collect shells and sea creatures in our buckets. New bikes were delivered this term, so the children are loving zooming around the garden. We also celebrated international oceans day, which included some fantastic coloured water play and ice melting.

We held our annual sponsored obstacle course this month, which was just like our own mini sports day. And of course we made lots of creations for fathers day and held a bring and buy sale so our little ones could independently choose their very own presents for Daddy.

In a few weeks time our older children will be leaving us for their next adventures at primary school, so we are busy planning their Graduation ceremony.