Preschool - Getting ready to grow

With the start of March and the feeling of Spring upon us, we have been thinking about the outdoors a lot in Preschool this week. We have been starting to think about our garden project and are keen to grow fruit, vegetables, herbs and flowers in Preschool and learn how to cultivate them ourselves.

We started by talking to the children about what we could grow. They were fantastic at thinking about what they enjoy eating, and what we would be able to plant in our garden. We thought about what herbs we use in our cooking, such as chives, coriander and basil, with one of our children remembering that he loves basil with tomatoes.

The children linked this to their experiences at home and we discussed what they have grown in their own gardens. We then created our sign to go outside, with the children using paint to write the sign which created an interest in writing and encouraged some of our older children to do some independent writing themselves.

This week, Miss Atieno has been introducing the letter ‘c’ to the children and also the sound ‘ch’. This led our wonderful Wednesday to become our ‘Cheeky Kitchen’. We incorporated a lot of the food that we had been discussing through the week with the ‘c’ and ‘ch’ sounds to create an activity which allowed the children to explore phonics with physical skills. The children discussed all the different foods in our kitchen that began with a ‘c’ or ‘ch’ and they were then given the opportunity to use a knife to cut up the food for themselves to eat at snack. The children were also given the opportunity to develop their fine motor skills by free cutting at the tray. We talked about the words ‘cut’ and ‘chop’ while they used the tools to practice cutting the vegetables.

The children extended the activity after snack by asking the teachers what food they wanted and preparing it for them. They took orders and some wrote the orders down themselves. We continued to support the children’s mark making skills, with foam in our black tray. The younger children explored free mark making and the older ones practising forming letters.

We are really looking forward to starting our garden and if any parents have any seeds,cuttings or resources that they would like to share with us, we would love that. Also, we are really keen to see on tapestry any growing you are doing at home so we can compare and support our garden project.