We are in full Christmas mode here at Amberley Playgroup. The children have helped to put up and decorate the Christmas tree. We have made gingerbread biscuits, Christmas cards We have been ordering Christmas trees by size and making a Christmas tree from basic shapes. Next week we have our Christmas party with Sarah from Dazzle coming to entertain us with some Christmas fun activities and hopefully a visit from Father Christmas!

We have been talking about being safe and being seen! The parish rooms became a busy road we learnt how to cross the road safely and use the zebra crossing. We watched a short video clip about road safety - wearing bright colours when its dark will help us keep us safe. We have been using our imagination during our role play. Hairdressers was a popular choice this week. Improving our independent dressing skills while dressing up too. The preschoolers played a listening game w

We have been continuing with our fine motor development activities to help with our scissors skills and pencil control. Bikes and trikes to help with negotiating space and adjusting speed to change direction. Puzzles and counting and sorting with conkers and our new sorting family figures set. We have talked about the importance of Remembrance Day and have made our own poppy pictures for a display. We have celebrated Diwali, the festival of light throughout the week by making

We have had lots of fun this week making potions, witches stew and playing with our new light table. The light table was bought with the funds from our recent Nearly New sale. We dressed up in our Halloween costumes and went 'trickle treating' round playgroup! We helped to carve a few pumpkins. We tacked in small nails into pumpkins to help with our fine motor development. The pre school children made up their own stories, wrote them down and then acted them out. We're all lo

We have been practising our fine motor development this week, Lots of cutting, using pincers, hammers and tacks and writing our own registers. We went to church for our monthly bible story time and was given some bulbs to look after. Hopefully with a bit of care and love these will grow into daffodils. The pre school children managed to escape the rain and went on a Gruffalo walk Wednesday afternoon. We had to use our listening ears and walk very quietly so we didn't frighte

This week we have been busy making cardboard gingerbread men adding and counting buttons, eyes and smiles. The children have also been counting with shiny conkers and recording their findings by using number lines. Lots of fun was had on the indoor wooden climbing frame and slide, with a few children overcoming individual challenges with lots of positive encouragement from both teachers and their peers. Creative colouring and lots of snipping was a popular self chosen activit

This week we have been practising our fine motor skills by threading, snipping and learning to use the tap on the water butt! We practised a emergency evacuation procedure and talked about what sort of emergencies would make us leave the building. The dressing up was very popular with weddings taking place and superhero's putting out fires! The preschoolers went on a listening walk up on the common and drew pictures of things they heard. we had some great drawings including

This week we have been making the most of the sunny weather. we have been cleaning our mud kitchen and outside resources, some of children helped with the sweeping and dusting the cobwebs from the playhouse. We had a delivery of extra resources from some of our favourite toys including pieces to add to the Mobilo. We helped to chop up the fruit for snack and Aggie was the lucky one to push the golden trolley! Next week we will be looking at basic shapes and finger strengthen

Lots of playing and exploring still happening this week. We have painted self portraits, noticing our differences by looking in mirrors and at each other. practising our pencil control skills and snipping at the playdough. The pre-school children have been introduced to Helicopter stories this involves the children making up their own stories and then acting them out. we have been following our playgroup rules and pointing out when each other has followed a rule! We even w

We have had a great first week back at Amberley Playgroup! All new children have settled in well and our existing children have taken on the role as 'big children' really well. We have been thinking about our new golden rules and have had some great suggestions! Lots of playing, choosing our own toys, helping with chopping up the fruit, lots if interest in snipping with scissors and generally just being independent.

So we have reached the end of term and the end of the Playgroup journey for our pre-school children. We said farewell with an extravaganza of a show, A Caribbean Adventure, produced by Andrea, our musical maestro, where our children had a chance to bring together all the skills they have learned and celebrate being the confident young people they have become. Congratulations to our class of 2019, we wish you well on your new adventures at school. We also released our butterfl

A massive thank you to Stroud Red Watch from Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue who visited us today. We had a fantastic morning learning about how to keep safe, when to call 999 and the importance of checking our homes for safe exits and smoke detectors. Nick and his team showed us all the equipment on the fire engine, demonstrated how they use all the different apparatus and let the children use the hose and also dress up in the uniforms. They talked to us about what help the

This week we brought a family of five caterpillars to Playgroup. We are going to watch them grow and the children have been learning about how to look after them. Over the next few weeks we will watch them going through the different stages of their life cycle and see them turn into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies. Some children chose to draw pictures of the caterpillars to take home. Some of our children are really keen architects and engineers and really enjoy tackling s

We have had a very busy week after a relaxing week off. Children have brought in lots of eco bricks and just look at how brilliantly our young eco explorers are doing! They have been making eco bricks to save all the ‘floppy plastic’ ending up in landfill. Our fantastic eco champion Andrea is going to work with the children to build a table for Playgroup. Keep bringing those bottles in and help us to make a difference to our environment. Watch this space for future updates. A

This week we have been talking about growing, making things bigger and smaller, weighing, planting bean plants and making cress caterpillars. We visited the Church to experience Bible Story Time and learned about being big and being small, the children joined in with action songs trying to show us how they can be really short or really tall. We used the microscope to look at aphids, ants and a silk worm and talked about how we can make things look bigger using magnification.

This week, one of the children brought in a catalogue and sat down with some friends to find things that they found interesting. They found a page with magnifying glasses, a telescope, binoculars and a microscope on it. We have a microscope so we took the opportunity to show the children how it works. They were fascinated and proceeded to use the microscope carefully and independently and this progressed into using magnifying glasses to look at a book about insects in the gar

We have now returned to Playgroup and Spring has finally sprung! We have welcomed some new children and their families. We have been looking at bugs, habitats and life cycles and spending lots of time outside looking and listening to nature around us. We have also made use of our water butt (thank you to one of our fantastic dads for this) and we even pretended to run a cheese shop outside when asked by one of the children! Some of our little learners wanted to practice physi

We held our annual Easter Show on Friday and the children sang and danced their hearts out in front of a wonderful audience of supportive Playgroup parents, carers, grannies, grandpas, aunties, uncles, cousins, siblings and even our very own Reverend John. The Maypole practice had really paid off and Andrea , once again, put together a musical 'eggstravaganza'! We received a visit from a furry friend- the Easter Bunny hid a lot of eggs outside in the grounds, the children del

This week, the preschoolers have been listening to sounds. We started by closing our eyes and listening to what we could hear. Great concentration! We then had an ‘initial sound’ treasure hunt. Some very creative treasure hunters with ‘mud’, ‘tyre’, ‘wheel’ and ‘flowers’. I wasn’t keen on the worm, thank goodness there aren’t any snakes in the park 😆Everyone got a sticker for finding their treasure and saying the sound it began with. We have continued looking at life cycles

We have been looking at signs of Spring that we might find down on the farm, matching baby animals with their mothers and completing farm scene puzzles by searching for numbers and putting them in order-a very tricky skill. We played a game where we rolled a dice and then found the number of animals to put in their field, some children could even find the piece of Numicon to match! The pre-schoolers looked at initial sounds by making some very 'Silly Soup'. The teachers were