Firstly, a big thank you to all the Dads that came and joined us for breakfast to celebrate their fantastic Daddiness. We hope you had a lovely Father’s Day!  On offer was either a bacon butty or a croissant and the chance to spend time chatting to other Dads about manly things!

As you will know, the Beach Clean is now a regular monthly event on the Young Friends calendar and this month we trundled down Holland Road to ensure our section of beach got its regular spruce up when the tide was low.

One of the most noteworthy events this month was our visit from Ofsted. We may have mentioned – we got Outstanding in all areas and now we are basking in the glory with business continuing as usual.

The weather has been mostly (very) kind, and the children have enjoyed lots of trips out, garden time and of course, quality learning experiences at our Nature Plot. They’ve been doing all sorts of thing like planting beans, beetroot, carrots and lettuces, bird spotting, minibeast hunting and doing nature walks. The children snipped herbs and petals to make perfume which they proudly let everyone try. They made flower crowns and suncatchers to celebrate the summer solstice and they very cleverly used all sorts of skills to draw maps of Plot 56 (our plot!). The scarecrow now looks very summery in his rather funky Hawaiin shirt – so funky in fact that we decided to make a video of the plot for the site. Thank you to all parents who gave permission for their child to be in it because it is just lovely, we hope you agree.  Part of the reason we wanted to do this was for you to see where your child spends their time and how much learning they do there. So if you haven’t watched it please do!

The Gibbons this month have been having lots of fun enhancing the sensory table with cornflour, bicarbonate of soda, vinegar, oil, washing up liquid and water.  They created a dinosaur swamp – sand and soapy water with dinosaurs and spoons so that children can ‘feed’ the dinosaurs and make marks in the wet sand. They got slippery with sudsy scrub and paint on colour frames with soap and water and had more fun getting wet with coloured bubbly water – trying to get the balls out of the water with spoons and their hands. They also made a waterbed – they placed bubble wrap over coloured water for the children to walk on and pour ice on – very refreshing!

The Baboons this month have been learning about the sea and the creatures that live there.  The children have been saving the animals from the plastic and metal using rubbish pickers and magnets. They have been brooming and whooshing cars around 4 different 2-d shaped road tracks and learning the properties of a square, a triangle, a circle and a rectangle. What this – cutting hair?! Not their own – don’t worry.  They pretended that the coloured paper was hair and snipped it into a fetching style thereby developing their cutting skills!  Your Baboons have also been collecting petals from Preston Park to make into bath bombs using baby oil and Epsom salts and making tree stump faces using natural materials. For a bit of PSE they have been matching pictures to make emotions such as sad, happy, angry, tired and excited.

Among lots of other things the Gorillas have been doing Science experiments with baking soda and vinegar, going on bug hunts, talking about differences in families and dancing to different rhythms and beats. They have been visiting their new schools, dressing up in school uniforms, counting, writing names for their registration board, alphabet colouring and writing messages to friends. They have been making father’s day cards, making playdough, doing action songs, playing nursery rhyme karaoke, playing football, cutting up vegetables and pouring and measuring liquids. They have been making faces with natural resources e.g. sticks and leave and exploring the properties of magnets, making artwork with metal straws and paint, playing parachute games, doing self-portraits and learning about the life cycle of a frog. They also had a party to see off their old friend Chiara. See you in Sardinia!