Preschool - Celebrations and festivals

Welcome back to the new half term, we hope you had a great break whatever you did. It was lovely to see many of you during the holidays where we celebrated all things Autumn and explored the festival Diwali. We made full use of having the school grounds to ourselves and spent a lot of time in the Forest School looking at the Autumn changes and collecting things to make fabulous creations.

We would also like to welcome our new families to Gateway School. Please feel free to speak to any members of the Preschool team if you have any questions.

This half term is a period of celebration and festivals. Our topic is journeys and how different festivals are celebrated around the world. We have been consulting our map to explore the idea of different countries and where people we know live.

Our return to Preschool got off to a loud and colourful start when we looked at Bonfire Night. The children made colourful creations with glitter and chalk and we worked together on big pictures using brightly coloured paint and throwing tea bags at the paper! The children looked at and discussed firework safety, I hope they shared some of this knowledge with you if you attended your own celebrations.

This week we have been looking at Remembrance Day and discussed, in a child friendly way, why we wear poppies. Charles was able to tell us ‘we wear poppies to remember the soldiers’. We have been busy and produced some fantastic wreaths using hand prints to make poppies for our classroom door . These were taken to our whole school assembly of Remembrance this morning.

As we get closer to Christmas, we would love parents with links to different countries to come and speak to us about how they celebrate at this time of year. We know the children will have lots of questions and enjoy guests visiting our setting. If you are unable to come in, please upload a short Tapestry post for us to share with the children.

The children have been introduced to our Christmas play ‘12 days of Christmas’. This might seem early - but in fact it's only 4 weeks away! All children are of course included and details of costumes required will be with you by next week.