Foam walls, planes and trains and copper teapots. Week beginning 27th June 2016…

What a mess! If we weren’t in the nursery game we would be spitting feathers – our pristine Green Room was awash with shaving foam as those ‘hilarious’ children of yours were walking around clapping their hands (full of shaving foam) just to splash and splatter walls and anyone lucky enough to be in clapping distance . They clearly, and understandably I guess, loved that manly clean smell and silky texture because they squealed and giggled as they rubbed it on their arms, hands and faces. The group were able to filled tea pots and poured imaginary grown up tea using cute little teacups and jugs filled with coloured water. They practiced their Makaton signs for ‘please’ and ‘more’ whilst playing with their Gibbon playmates and kindly poured ‘tea’ into each other’s teacups. And some more. And some more. Your littles ones explored our ‘Tiny Tim’ song bag and, to make their singing experience one to remember, inside thus song back was a rather cute little turtle, a teeny tiny bath, some soap and a bottle of bubbles for the Gibbons to pop whilst singing along to that oh so popular song.

The mighty Baboons have been looking through books about transport where they found fascinating (well they are only 2) pictures of buses, trains, boats, aeroplanes, and bicycles. The children had a selection of small world vehicles out to choose from, along with some paper aeroplanes that were manufactured from paper designed by the Baboons fair hands. The group made  a choo choo, vroom and chugga chug sound as those vehicles as those modes of transport glided around the room. The dance studio played host to an assortment of pursuits this week – there were  parachute games and some very imaginative and even heartfelt bodily, how shall I say it, expressions, this week as they jived, boogied, twirled and pranced away to an array of music from all over the world. Making practical use of their fancy dress collection the Baboons practiced some life skills by fastening their own zips, pulling clothes over heads and doing their own belts up. Well they can’t be relying on us grown ups forever.

The Gorillas grew up rapidly this with some actual real home role play this week with our new home corner.  We have been sifting thrift shops Brighton-wide and accepting kind donations from you guys and as a result the children have been serving each other dinner using proper kitchen utensils, pouring tea, measuring ingredients and laying tables restaurant style. They have been using glass and china like the finest of diners. They have been lounging in the lounge, reading books,  changing and settling babies, getting no end of entertainment out of switching their sitting room lamp on and off and telling the time with their house clock. The scales have been weighing all things natural from beach stones and exotic shells to sharks, turtles and cork sticks. Your children assessed the relevance of the dial spinning around and shouted out the numbers they recognised as the weight increased – impressive.  The phonics the preschool focused on this week was ‘L’ and ‘R’ and the children cleverly recognised who had the sound or letter in their name – some even had a go at trying to writing the letters too. Nice. Some Gorillas have been recognising different types of sounds they could hear outside in the garden and others tried to create new sounds with different objects. The string of of flags was an educational topic for conversation at the lunch table with some children asking questions – what flags were and why we have them, what countries the flags belonged (some even knew a couple – amazing), which were their favourites and most importantly – why none of them were pink.