Welcome to our June Newsletter

We would like to welcome all our new parents and children who have recently joined us. 

We hope that you enjoy your time with us and would request that if you have any queries, questions or suggestions that you please speak to a member of staff.

Hello and goodbye

Hello and welcome to new staff team members Liz, Ben and Katie we hope they enjoy their time with us.

Goodbye to Claire who leaves for a new adventure.

Good luck to Charlotte and Becky, we hope they enjoy a well-earned rest before their babies arrive.

Congratulations

Sending our very best wishes to Leah, Hannan and their families as they welcome their new arrivals. We look forward to meeting them soon.

Queens Jubilee

To celebrate the Queens Platinum Jubilee marking 70 years on the throne,
we hosted a Pre-School Garden party on Wednesday 25th May. It was a
lovely occasion and the 1st family event we have been able to hold since the pandemic began. Seeing everyone together enjoying themselves with cake and ice-cream made us all feel very happy indeed.

Thank you so much for all the comments we have received indicating how much you all enjoyed it and acknowledging the fantastic effort by the
Pre-School team to make it such a success. 

Baby sign

As a Centre we have recently had a focus on communication and language and as a result of this, two members of staff undertook a baby signing course in Makaton. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept here is a link to a short video which explains this exciting form of communication for our non-verbal children which can also be used alongside speech. 

We will start incorporating this into our practise and we would welcome you to join in too. We will be introducing “the sign of the month” and we will also be using it alongside everyday routines. Any questions feel free to speak to Gemma in Crèche 2 and Helen in the Baby room. 

Main Door Access 

Can ALL parents ensure that they use their access cards/fobs when entering the building. Admin staff are spending an increasing amount of time answering the door, which has an impact on workload.

Baby Room

This term in the baby room, we have been welcoming our new starters and settling them into the baby room routine. It’s been lovely to learn all about them from their families and see their confidence building and little personalities emerge as the room becomes more familiar.

We have been exploring our outdoor area adding real life objects and herbs for our garden. We have also changed our seasonal area to summertime, it’s full of shells, buckets and spades with lots of beach themed pictures. The babies are thoroughly enjoying exploring it all.

Crèche 1

This term we have been welcoming our new children and families into
Crèche 1, building positive relationships and introducing them to their new environment.

The children have visited the big sandpit in the garden, this sparked their curious minds as they searched for objects hidden in the sand.  The children were also encouraged to develop some new physical skills, learning how to sieve, dig and pour.

To extend the activity we made a little sandpit at floor level back in our room and provided resources for the children to transport sand, they filled containers and moved them along using the string line pulley. They have been very observant, watching their friends and learning how to do the process themselves.

Nursery 1

The children in Nursery 1 have been enjoying and exploring various activities using vintage suitcases, they particularly enjoyed the Space theme and Sea Life theme. 

We filled the suitcase with sand and different objects so the children could explore sandy baking, sandy printing and sand nature faces, this sparked the children’s imaginations so well we are now looking for other vintage items to use for our curiosity-based activities. If you have any items at home that you would like to donate to help build our bank of activities, please speak to your child’s Keyperson.

Nursery 2

We have had a very busy few weeks in Nursery 2 doing lots of different and exciting activities. One of which has been learning about bees, as it was International Bee Day on the 20th May. 

In small groups we looked at the book ‘Bee Makes Tea’ and ‘The Book of Bees’. We learnt about the importance of looking after bees and how we need them for pollination which is essential for many of our food crops. We learnt how there are different types of bees and how bees make honey, we explored natural resources in our bee tuff tray which looked like a honeycomb. We also looked at some of the plants which bees really like and plan to get some for our outdoor area, and we hope to extend this activity by making our own dandelion honey.

Pre-School 1

Following on from the children's interest in volcanoes we decided to create our own. We used a variety of materials and spoke to the children about how we’ve re-used non-recyclable materials for another purpose. 

The children contributed to the project by bringing in newspaper, magazines and polystyrene from home to use. The children understood there was a process to completing the volcano, they showed patience in waiting for it to be finished and worked hard on each step of the project. 

New vocabulary was introduced and the volcano is currently dormant. Plans are afoot for it to erupt within the next few weeks though. 

Pre-School 2

When Eden Bear came to stay in Pre-School 2, we went for a picnic. 

The children showed Eden Bear how they could make their own sandwiches using their fine motor skills to spread both butter and jam and gross motor skills to cut up cucumber. One of the children even made a special sandwich, just for Eden Bear! 

We then went down to the garden and set up a picnic together. We ate our homemade sandwiches and had a little biscuit as a treat. 

Whilst we had our picnic, we talked about other things that we had done with Eden Bear. We created a group oral story where we took him to our beach tuff tray, drove him down Morecambe promenade in our cars, naming landmarks as we went to make him feel happy. He even saw a parrot in a tree!

We fed him some playdough ice cream. We then also made some real ice cream using a hand whisk, it was hard work, but it helped us to understand the concept of liquids becoming solidified when frozen and the bonus was we could eat the end result!  

We had lots of fun with Eden Bear and think he enjoyed his visit.

Pre-School 3

Pre-School 3 have been exploring games where they have move in different ways. We went retro old school by drawing our games on the floor, we played Snakes n Ladders, Hopscotch, Rockets for counting, Zigs-Zags and Spirals, just like in the olden days.

All these activities encouraged movement in different ways, balancing, co-ordination, turn taking, working together, it also encouraged number recognition, counting, matching numbers. 

Pre-School 3 have also had a visitor, Eden Bear from the Eden project came to play. We played on the beach, made and ate ice-cream which was very yummy, told each other stories, made up stories about playing on the beach and what we found, Eden Bear thought our stories were really good.

You can read more about the Eden project and the Morecambe Bay Curriculum below.

Western Link District Heating Project

Heavy excavation works to install new District Heating pipework are starting from 1st August onwards. This will improve the energy efficiency of the Ruskin and Pre-School Centre as part of a larger, campus-wide carbon reduction project. Find out more about the project here and view a map of the areas the work will effect. 

We will provide further communications as the project progresses. 

Reminders

A reminder to parents to please administer sun cream to your child prior to them attending their session. 

Can you please also ensure that the Pre-School has a named bottle of sun cream in situ for your child to be able to use as and when required.

Pre-School Website and Newsfeed 

We would like to remind parents that you can access regularly updated information from our website www.lancaster.ac.uk/pre-school and our twitter feed https://twitter.com/LUPSCentre