Preschool children enjoy an Autumn walk

It has been another busy week in preschool with the children enjoying our Autumn topic. The sunny weather has allowed us to spend a lot of time outside, with the children enjoying a nature walk on Tuesday morning. They were excited to see the horses in the fields which presented a learning opportunity where Xavier found a sign which had a horse on it with a line through. We had lots of amazing answers as to what it meant. Preschool decided, with a little help that it was telling us not to feed the horses. This interest encouraged the children to look out for other signs along the way, with help to think about what the signs were telling us. Following this, we will continue this interest through role play opportunities and involve the children in thinking about what signs could be useful to display in their play.

We continued with our Autumn walk, looking at changes to the leaves and the environment. We had great fun collecting conkers with Evelyn and Benji being our top conker collectors, both pleased to have filled their buckets to the top. We then looked for, and found lots of other signs of Autumn such as the different coloured trees around the school ground. Please ask your child which tree they enjoyed looking at the most as we were amazed to find lots of different colored trees on our walk back to Preschool. On wednesday morning we furthered this by using our collected conkers to estimate how many conkers we had collected. Our estimates varied from 1 to 100. Mia and Evie were closest at 100. Then we took turns to count our conkers and found out we actually had 125.

In Preschool, we value the importance of listening to, and following the children’s individual interests which supports their confidence, self esteem and involvement when providing opportunities for learning. This week, we were blown away by Essie’s care and concern towards living creatures, as she went through great lengths to protect a woodlouse in Preschool. This interest encouraged us to have a spontaneous bug hunt on Wednesday afternoon, where we shared our thoughts about the importance of respecting all living creatures and how we can help to look after them. It was lovely to see Essie feel valued and listened to as she helped the adults to explain how we can care and look after the insects.

Our minibeast loving children enjoyed finding ladybirds, centipedes, a beatle and lots and lots of worms. This opportunity allowed us to use the language of length, such as long, longer, longest when looking at the wiggly worms that we found. We made sure that the bugs were safely released and returned to where we found them.

Thank you to Xavier for bringing in the story book ‘We’re Going on a Pumpkin Hunt’ which we look forward to sharing with everyone next week. We would also like to invite the children to come in dressed up on Wednesday where we are going to have a ‘friendly and not scary’ Halloween theme day.