Preschool - Understanding health and emotions

Welcome back to the new half term, and a very warm welcome to our new families. I hope you all had an enjoyable break whatever you did and are ready for the new topic. It was lovely to see some of you during the school holiday. The booking sheets are now open for the holiday sessions during the Easter break.

Our topic this half term is Healthy Eating, we will be exploring healthy foods and those which we should only eat occasionally. Our chef, Mr Cliff is coming to talk to the children about choosing healthy foods, will be following recipes, cooking and we will be looking at exercise and the effects of this on our bodies. We are pleased to welcome Miss Eades who is a new member of our team, who is with us on Monday and Tuesday whilst studying for an NVQ3 in Childcare. She made a fabulous game for the children to play which focused on making plates of healthy food, this was much enjoyed by the children.

Our story this week is “Oliver's Fruit Salad”. Oliver's Grandad grows all of his own fruit and vegetables. We will link our learning to the story and plant different fruits and vegetables. We hope to make a salad with everything we grow.

As the weather has been so mild we have taken the opportunity to be outside more. We have enjoyed nature walks to look for signs of Spring, where the children found loads of daffodils and snowdrops. There was much discussion with the children about the difference between catkins and caterpillars and we decided (with the help of Google) that the furry things on the school field were in fact catkins! Our walks have inspired some of our art work and the children have produced the most amazing snowdrop pictures. The children have enjoyed learning about the natural world around them and have been busy painting many different flower pictures.

We are also focusing on expressing how we feel. In the morning the older children are indicating how they feel using emotion pictures, and placing their name on pictures of faces expressing different emotions. We then re-visit this in the session to see if they feel differently. Miss Francis, our French teacher, has also focused on this during lessons so we are also learning to express our emotions in French.

Could we please have photos on Tapestry of anything you did during the break, holidays, days out or even days at home, as the children love sharing what they got up to with their friends. If anyone has any photos of healthy eating or cooking activities this would be amazing. It gives the children an opportunity to talk in front of a group, and we are always amazed at how much they all enjoy these sessions.