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We made a bug hotel.
As the children enjoy bug hunting so much we extended the opportunities for this by building a bug hotel. The children we re asked to collect sticks, twigs, pinecones, feathers, dried leaves, flower pots in readiness for building. We recycled a boat frame and began to fill this, doesn’t it look amazing?
We celebrated VE day with our own red, white and blue street party after we had learnt about the importance of the day.
We made red, white and blue fruit kebabs to eat as we listened to music from the time. We joined in the National Anthem and we stood for a 2 minute silence to show our respect.
Making the most of the sunshine in our beautiful gardens
Look at our amazing Easter bonnets made by Caterpillar & Butterfly Class. We are very proud of you.
We had a very special visit from the Chair of the Royal British Legion ( Walton on the Naze branch) whose branch had recently held a darts and pool competition, followed by a quiz and donated 50% of the proceeds to the Pre School to support the allotment development.
We are so very grateful.
The local wildlife are now visiting our gardens on a regular basis, we even gave them a tough tray to paddle in
Lets make an owl like the one in our favourite book
We are focussing on patterns, repeating patterns and colours
We love science and celebrated science week with lots of fun experiments.
We are looking forward to hatching butterflies and Others day.
During March we attended the Nourishing our Future (NOF) conference at Anglia Ruskin University. This event culminated all the research that Early Years settings in Essex had been providing over the food practices, cooked meals, packed lunches and snack options which are available in Early Years Settings. It was informative, inspirational and we look forward to stage 2 of action.
We have started planting seeds in preparation for our allotment planting.
We are so proud of our bulbs which we planted last year ready for Mothers and Others day.
The children enjoyed making the pancake mix and watching them cook, we all had a go at tossing a pancake and then sat down to enjoy them for our snack.
More amazing tuff trays.
We made rainbow clouds and worked hard on mastering pencil control to be able to write our names.
We took advantage of the nice weather and made bird feeders, we made sure we have our salopettes and wellington boots on before we went into Walton Woods our Forest School garden.
The year of the snake – This year we celebrated Chinese New Year with a visit from the Colchester Chinese Culture Society who taught us a Chinese dance, some Chinese language and the meaning behind why red bags are given at New Year.
We took part under ‘Bert’ our dragon and danced under his body (sheet) which we had decorated with Chinese symbols.
Look what we can do with a cotton wool bud?
We also celebrated more of our favourite books, can you guess which ones ?
We enjoy expanding our knowledge through science experiments and opportunities to predict the outcome of these
We were so very pleased that so many parents were able to join us for our first Pre School Christmas Carol concert at All Saints Church. We had shared our special Christmas songs with Rev Peter as they are a little different to his normal hymns! We all left Church feel very much in the Christmas Spirit.
The Christmas activities begin with the decorating of the trees. Then the elves arrive with surprises for both classes. Plans for Christmas dinner.
Take shape with a lovely food donation from Marks & Spencers. Our super Trustees arrive to cook Chrisrmas dinner for all the chilren, the staff and our guests ( Reverand Peter, Marks & Spencers staff, FoodBank volunteers and fellow Trustees) follwed by Santa arriving to give every child a present, even the staff were treated to a special surprise too.
The Pre School joined a soup club whereby we were given a soup maker, recipe cards and ingredients for 6 weeks.
The children really enjoyed the peeling, chopping, smell and taste of the vegetables. We really enjoyed tasting new flavours and were often surprised by how much we enjoyed some of the tastes!
We tried
This year again the children joined other local community members at the Memorial Gardens in Walton on the Naze to pay their respects to those that had given their lives to protect others. The children waited to be called and walked to the front to lay their wreath with pride.
We also created classroom displays and watched a children’s video to help us understand the meaning of this special day.
Walton Pre School is very proud to be recognised for its outstanding community work and received a highly commended Business Award at Tendring Town Hall. It was a real red carpet event and we felt very special. Laura and Jackie represented the team and on being announced a with a full statement about our work being read out to the guests.
It was a beautiful evening and a lovely accolade to receive which recognises that we are so much more than a Pre school, we support our community too.
The children were excited to bring in their donations for harvest, this year we organised a trip to see our local vicar Reverand Peter at the Church ( All Saints) in Walton on the Naze. We walked with our trusted adults on a nice bright Autumn morning. We looked in the shops as we walked through the town. Peter welcomed us and showed us all around the Church before the special harvest service and songs began.
We really enjoyed our time at the Church and when we got back to Pre School we took our Harvest collection to the Walton & District Foodbank for re distribution in the local community.
Wow what a busy first week and well done to all the children who have settled so well into Pre School.
The children have been keen to explore the Walton Woods garden area and have picked apples, seen our family of pheasants ( mum now have 5 babies) found bugs, picked radishes and tomatoes and so much more.
Looking forward to lots more fun and learning.
Its both a time to celebrate and a time of sadness as we say farewell to our Butterfly Class who are moving onto ‘big school’ in September.
We are so very proud of each and everyone of you.
We often undertake baking as part of expanding our children’s life skills, today we chose to make sandwiches instead. We carefully spread the butter on the bread, followed by Jam. We then put the two pieces of bread together and with support cut the bread into triangles so that we could eat the sandwiches at snack time. Yum Yum they were delicious!
We had beautiful flowers all donated by Marks and Spencer’s and were helped in our design by members of the group. Butterfly Class all made an arrangement which they took home to their parents.
Ever wondered why children come home from Pre School covered in flour?
Well it has great usage when learning to trace around letters, its so easy and soft to run your fingers through and create the letters in the flour with immediate recognition of what has been created.
On Friday we said our goodbyes to Dingleberry, Quaxley, Chick, Sweetpea, Arsenal and Flopsy. It will strange for everyone not to have these amazing ducklings, who have filled the last 3 weeks with moments of excitement, anticipation, amazement, laughter, awe and wonder. It has been such an amazing educational experience with so many moments witnessed in real time by the children and staff.
We are all going to miss you so much.
Our first duckings arrived and we were so lucky as we were able to sit and watch this.
The children had chosen names and as each duckling was hatched a name was drawn from the hat.
We’re in the local paper (www.gazette-news.co.uk.)
We were lucky to meet a wonderful couple at the recent Nursery World Show in London, who explained to us about how their son had sadly died after choking in a nursery. Through this tragedy they have researched and developed an anti choking device which they kindly donated to us.
Their aim is to get this device into as many nurseries as they can to help to prevent / reduce the risk of choking. So far over 1040 children’s lives have been saved.
We are so very grateful to the Oliver Steeper Foundation for this donation. All staff have now completed their training.
Whilst in our forest school garden we looked for bugs and had a visit from two friendly ducks.
We created our own nature windows to see what mini beasts we could find and what better place to look than our bug house. We hope with continued good weather than we can undertake some repairs to this and to replenish some areas to create a cozy environment for our bugs to live. We also collected twigs and brought these back int the classroom to make shapes.
Our New Topic for the Spring is growing, we have been busy making grass worms
We have been busy weeding our wildflower garden after the long winter. We are now looking all tidy again and would be grateful if anyone has any plants that they would be happy to donate to make this look less bare. We are hoping with warmer weather that we may begin to see some little seedlings appear
Today we celebrated World Book Day in lots of ways, including dressing up, reading our favourite books, learning about authors and illustrators and making our Cat in the hat fruit skewers to eat at snack time. We ended the day by listening to Michael Rosen reading ‘Were going on a bear hunt.’
As part of this terms topic we have been learning about roles in the community. We had been learning about the Fire Service and created our own area to spray down with hoses.
Last week the children continued the topic ‘People Who Help Us’ with a Builders tuff tray. We had bricks and different tools builders use to build and construct. We used shaving foam for cement to help hold our bricks together and not forgetting our safety hats.
We celebrated Shrove Tuesday and made pancakes in the classroom. We mixed the batter practicing our cracking eggs skills and then we pretended to flip these – Oh what fun
We then cooked these on our portable ovens. We chose healthy fillings of fruit but also had some squirty cream! They were super delicious end enjoyed by all the children and of course the staff too.
As we continue to learn about the community we live in we went to visit Walton Library for a song and rhyme session, which included many of the children’s favourites.
We then were able to have a look around the children’s library area, choosing books to share with our teachers, colouring in the new sheets at the desk as well as exploring the new equipment such as the sensory seating areas.
Thank you so much for a lovely morning.
We are learning about our local community and went on a trip to our local Marks & Spencers shop
We were soon greeted by M&S staff at the front doors. We bought along our own shopping trolleys and baskets. We were given a shopping list and with our adults we went to find the items. We filled our trolleys and baskets high! We even got to use the checkout and scan the items we had brought.
We were invited into the back of the store for a rest break to have a biscuit and some juice/milk.
We had the most wonderful morning in Our Community.
A BIG thank you to all the staff at M&S who made us feel so welcome, smiled throughout our visit with nothing being too much trouble.
Our children proudly took part in the Remembrance Day service. We walked through the town following the band and even marched to the drum beat. We carried our wreath with pride and waited to be called out to lay this at the memorial. The Royal British Legion and local Councillors praised us for our attendance and behaviour as some of the youngest participants.
As part of our Harvest Celebrations the children have been visited by Mark Rowlands from Coastlands Community Church. Mark spoke with the children about Harvest Festival, the children all engaged and asked many questions. The children were so proud of their Harvest donations they invited Mark to follow them into the corridor. Mark was thrilled to see the enormous amount of donations that will help support the community.
The children have enjoyed various activities to help with our topic ‘All About Me’.
They have been making faces using natural resources from Walton Woods along with playdough and craft materials. They also used glue to stick facial features onto blank faces. We then asked the children if they could point to different features on their own faces. These activities helped the children to gain confidence in their conversational skills, helped develop their fine motor skills and helped them understand similarities and differences between themselves.
Coloured monster spaghetti! The children used their fine motor skills using tweezers to grab hold of the spaghetti and place into matching coloured bowls. This also gave the children time to express themselves using language of how they feel ‘sad, happy, excited, angry, confused, scared’. We then read the book ‘The Colour Monster goes to School ‘.
We used bowls, tweezers, mini dinosaurs, vehicles and bears to sort objects into colours. We used tweezers to pick up each mini object to put them in the correct group. This helped to promote gross and fine motor skills to help develop pencil control and scissor control . Children extended this by adding water to see if dinosaurs would sink or float.
We have had such a busy first couple of weeks as we support our new children to settle and our existing children to get used to their new classrooms.
We have explored to the fullest and found trees to climb, crates to balance on, food to make, tuff trays to be messy in, puzzles to make and of course the grass to be cut. We had so much fun, enjoyed each other’s company, began to make friends and had lots of laughter and fun.
We are of course learning too!
We had a wonderful Graduation Ceremony and Family Picnic in Walton Woods to celebrate the achievements of, and say a fond farewell to our Butterfly Class of 2023.
We all feel very blessed to have known the children and extremely emotional to be sending them off on their new adventures.
We wish our families all the very best and we know all the children from Butterfly Class 2023 will continue to be amazing.
We thoroughly enjoyed watching the storm this week. The children were curious as they saw the first flash of lightning then we heard the thunder. We opened the doors and watched the storm whilst discussing what a thunderstorm was. One explanation was “lightning is a flash and thunder is when the clouds dance and rain comes out”
We asked the children if there’s any songs about rain and we sang “I hear thunder” and “it’s raining it’s pouring.”
The children and staff have had so much fun
making our entry for the Frinton Scarecrow Festival. Transporting
our Royal Guard and his trusty steed ‘Windsor’ was interesting! They were both
a very popular exhibit with the visitors throughout the day.
Our wild flower garden is springing into life with beautiful flowers and colours to attract the wildlife.
We had an amazing visit from the fire service based at Frinton. The firefighters were so welcoming of the children’s questions and thoroughly enjoyed showing them all the different parts of the engine and all the equipment and tools they carry.
Thank you so much for your time.
We enjoyed having a camp fire yesterday and eating smores, so very yummy!
We had an amazing beach trip yesterday with Caterpillar Class. We had so much fun playing in a rock pool
and found so many interesting things. We ended the day with a lolly before we walked back to Pre school.
We thoroughly enjoyed our transport day. We were joined by our local PCSO officers who helped us understand about road safety and dangers that may occur on the roads and when crossing the roads. The children learnt about road safety that incorporated: roundabouts, zebra crossings, traffic lights, speed cameras and building works as well as staying safe around other road users. After all our fun we came back into our classrooms for a bowl of ice cream.
To further support our Transport Day, our cooking activity this week was also transport themed as we made traffic light biscuits, which were delicious!
We enjoyed having a camp fire yesterday and eating smores, so very yummy!
The children have been planting lots of seeds and plants, watering them and watching them as they grow. Look at our fabulous grass and cress caterpillars!
We celebrated Silly Sock Day during Autism acceptance Week (27th March – 2nd April) by wearing our silliest socks. We celebrate each year to help to raise awareness and start conversations about autism, whilst having fun and coming together to raise vital funds to support the work that Autism Anglia do
On March 8th 2023 we celebrated International Women’s Day. As a Pre School we always engage our children in activities and conversations to inspire and reinforce an inclusive mindset.
We champion the role of women and hope to inspire our future generations to challenge any form of discrimination today, tomorrow and everyday.
We celebrated Holi at the end of March, this is the Hindu festival of colours, love and spring. We had various activities such as decorating patterns using coloured rice, paint mixing activities, mixing chalk to create new colours, making different coloured playdough and then mixing them together. We ended the day by taking part in our own colour run outside. We wore goggles or sun glasses and old T shirts to protect our clothes and eyes.
This was such a lovely experience which the children thoroughly enjoyed
Today the children have practised the fire drill.
They all listened and followed instructions given by their teachers.
The children waited patiently whilst the register was taken and stood nicely at the fire evacuation point.
All children have received a certificate and sticker.
Well done everyone!
Staff and children took part in this years world book day by either dressing up as their favourite character from a book or bringing in their favourite book and wearing pyjamas.
We had a fun day reading lots of stories and love the annual celebration of authors, illustrators, books and the overall joy of reading
We celebrated St Davids Day by making our own daffodils.
To celebrate Pancake Day the children have participated in various activities. They have been busy cutting and sticking to make their own pancakes with different toppings. On the maths table we’ve had out different size frying pans with numbered pancakes. The children even had a go at flipping the pancake in the frying pan.
The children all came together during snack time, followed a healthy recipe of how to make pancakes, helped mix the ingredients together alongside staff in readiness to cook their pancakes.
The children self selected their fruit for extra toppings alongside some lemon and a little drizzle of sugar. Don’t they look delicious!
We celebrated Chinese New Year in January, we ate noodles and prawn crackers which were delicious. The children made traditional red money wallets, Chinese lanterns and attempted to copy some traditional Chinese writing. We had noodles in our tuff tray where we practised using chop sticks! We set up an interest table with all things Chinese in order that the children could explore and extend their knowledge.
During the last week at Pre School, whilst lots of festive activities were taking place, one special occasion we were all looking forward to was Christmas dinner.
We all came together for this very special social occasion. With helpers from the Committee supporting with cooking and Foodbank joining us too for dinner.
Lots of crackers were pulled and laughter had by all.
A very special thank you to our Committee helpers and also to Food Bank who paid for the Christmas meal. Walton Pre School is very thankful for the support we receive.
Thank you all for supporting Children in Need. We are thrilled to have raised £40.00.
The children all took part in a variety of activities, during our pyjama day at Pre School.
We also had a very special visitor too! Thank you to our local Primary School – Walton Primary School.
On Friday 11th November the children at Pre School held a 2 minute silence to remember all of our soldiers and animals that fought in the war.
In preparation the children made individual lanterns to hold as well as using the Pre School uniform to create one large Poppy in the middle of the Pre School Hall to stand around during our silence.
We all had a spooktacular day at pre-school today.
During this week the children have celebrated Diwali.
The children have explored fact files with staff, understanding the meaning of Diwali: Row of lights; A festival celebrated by Hindus and Sikhs.
With the classrooms coming together staff and children created a large Rangoli pattern on the floor using a wide range of coloured rice.
First the children collaged half an elephant face (Caterpillar Class 2-3 years and Butterfly Class 3-4 years) showing their differentiation and interpretation in choice of materials and resources used.
The elephant symbolises: education, wisdom, wealth and prosperity.
The children discussed the colours and identified that each bag contained a matching cup.
The children worked together and filled the pattern beautifully. Look what we created!
This week the children took part in a potion making activity. Flowers were added to the table along with scissors for the children to cut, snip and pull the petals and leaves off.
We discussed the smell, texture as well as ingredient’s that we felt were missing to finish our potions.
The children gathered their clip boards and drew pictures to identify to staff the ingredients that needed to be collected from the kitchen: bubbles, water, coloured water (food colouring) and spoons.
Their potions were very magical!
On Friday the 16th September the children came together in their classes to remember Her Majesty The Queen. The children looked through national newspapers at circle times, took part in beautiful art activities and stood for a 1minute silence.
We prepared the cage ready for new ducklings to settle into
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