Activities

At pre-school we try to offer a wide and varied choice of activities.

Everyday we have split peas, sand, painting, writing, drawing, chalk boards, playdough, dressing up, and a number of tabletop and floor activities which are changed every day.

We have a ‘home corner’ where children can let their imaginations run wild with a play cooker, washing machine, iron, dolls, pushchairs etc. At other times the home corner is set up as a shop with till, toy groceries, money etc, or as a hospital with beds and lots of play medical equipment.

We regularly have cooking activities, where the children are involved in all aspects of the preparation. The only part of these activities the staff do without the children’s help is using the oven or hob. The children love making things and enjoy the fact that they can take them home at the end of the session to proudly show off and, if you are lucky, perhaps share with you! Recently we have made vegetable curry, soups, bread rolls and bird feed cakes.

We have an enclosed outdoor play area where we have climbing frames, tunnels, a trampoline, trikes, rockers, hoops, bats, balls and many more fun toys. There is also a shaded gazebo where children can sit quietly and look at books, listen to stories etc.

In cold or wet weather we simply clear the main room and put up our indoor climbing frame, trampoline, rocker and many more toys. This allows the children to enjoy physical play whatever the weather.

We have a ‘busy room’ where we have different fun (and often very messy!) activities. We make displays for our walls and to take home, usually linked to whatever our current topic is. We use paint, glue, bubbles, cornflour, slime, collage, junk modelling and many more things to create a huge variety of projects.

Throughout the year we try to have visits from various outside agencies to talk to the children. We have recently been visited by a dentist, who discussed the importance of looking after your teeth, healthy eating etc with the children, and gave out work and colouring sheets, stickers and so on, which were very popular! We were also visited by a Community Police Officer, who read a story to the children.

We like to involve the children is as many different things as possible, and our staff take small groups to the nearby recycling bins regularly to help to recycle pre-school’s milk cartons, bottles etc.