Wishing you all a very Happy Easter from everyone at Waterbeach Community Playgroup
Please support us - Tesco Community Grant Project
We are very excited at Playgroup as we have been chosen to take part in the Tesco Community Grant project during April! We are currently raising money towards some much needed storage so that our children can easily access resources, make independent choices and facilitate their own play
All you have to do is collect a blue token when you pay for your shopping from either the cashier or at the self serve tills and then cast your vote by placing the token in our section of the community grant box.
Here is a list of shops where you can vote for us
Bar Hill Cambs Extra CB23 8EL
Campkin Rd Cambs Exp CB4 2NF
Cambridge N/Market Rd CB5 8LD
Cherry Hintn Camb Exp CB1 9HU Fulbourn Cherryhinton CB1 9BF L
Histon Cambs Express CB24 9JD
Milton CB24 6AY
Orchard Park Cambs CB4 2AD
Cambridg Cris Lan Exp CB1 1NP
Chesterton Cambs Exp CB4 1NX
Hills Rd Cambs Exp CB2 1NW Cambs Clifton Rd Exp CB1 7DY
Cambridge East Rd Exp CB1 1BG
Great Shelford Exp CB22 5EY
Thank you for supporting us
Week beginning 17th April 2023
Dandelion and Daisy Butterfly
This week we returned to playgroup following the Easter holidays to some lovely warm and sunny weather. Watching the trees burst into life and the return of the mini beasts really helped us to explore all things spring .
Our first activity was making a beautiful flower butterfly, we spent time collecting dandelions and daisy’s and carefully slotting them into the holes on the butterfly…..it was a bit tricky and really helped give our fingers a good workout!
Activities like this really help us to develop the muscles in our hands and fingers which we use for things like mark making and manipulating objects like cutlery.
Mini beasts
We spent time looking at and thinking about mini beast habitats, both inside the playhouse in an exploration tray and also in the garden too. The children used the magnifying glasses to help them find the insects in the tray, some of them were hiding and camouflaged really well so we had to look very closely,
Outside the children spotted butterflies, wasps, bees, a lady bird and also found a centipede hiding in the mud kitchen area, we used the magnifying pots so that we could take a closer look at the centipede without hurting it, once we had all had a look we let it go again……I wonder if the centipede will visit us a playgroup again.
Beautiful butterflies
We have been seeing lots of butterflies in our garden so we thought it would be lovely to create some butterflies to hang in the playhouse too. We thought about what we could use to make the butterflies and gathered all of the resources and set to work. The children were free to use their imagination to create using glue, paint and collage materials.
Spring Time Blossom
We have been looking at the changes of the plants and trees around the playhouse and many of the children and staff have noticed the beautiful blossom appearing on the trees while they walk to preschool. So today we used some of the sticks we collected and made our own blossom branches, screwing pieces of tissue paper up and gluing them on to our paper, thinking about what the blossom looked like…… we certainly have lots of pink blossom trees in Waterbeach!
Spring Time Maths
We practiced our number recognition and measuring skills this week too! first we had to match the number flowers to the correct pots in the sand tray…… and of course we had lots of fun scooping pouring and playing with the sand. We also practiced our measuring and counting skills using the maths cubes, predicting and then measuring how many cubes tall each flower was….. We had to use our super counting skills carefully counting each cube
Colourful Flowers and Butterlies
At Community Playgroup we have lots of children that enjoy anything and everything to do with water, so today we made some butterflies and flowers using coloured water, pipettes and absorbent paper. The children used the pipettes to suck up the water and then make patterns on the paper, there was lots of exploration going on from colour mixing right through to how much water it took to cover the paper.
Pipettes are excellent at helping to develop fine motor skills and strengthening muscles in the children’s hands, and of course are lots of fun too, our children definitely enjoyed this activity!
We hope you’ve enjoyed seeing what we’ve been up to this week why not come back next week to see what we get up to as we explore healthy eating and oral health.
Week beginning 24th April 2023
Oral health and keeping ourselves healthy
This week at playgroup we have been exploring how to keep ourselves fit, healthy and also how to look after our teeth. We had lots of fun activities to explore and here are just a few of the things we got up to together.
Dentists and Doctors Role Play
We pretended to be dentists and doctors and made sure all of the dolls and teddy bears all had strong heartbeats and healthy teeth. Its really interesting to watch the children play and explore these set ups as they demonstrate their own knowledge and first hand experiences, but this then can also leads to some fantasy based play as the children direct their own play according to their own interests.
Cleaning teeth
It’s really important that we make sure that we clean our teeth well so that they stay healthy, protected and strong so this week we practiced our brushing skills in a variety of ways here are a couple of the activities we enjoyed. Firstly we used erasable pens to cover the teeth in ‘food, germs and decay’ before using our super skills to scrub the teeth clean and secondly we cleaned some 3D teeth, this helped demonstrate to the children how we need to clean each individual tooth from gum to the top. The children were really good at cleaning the teeth and also had lots of fun making them dirty again so they could clean them all over again!!
Healthy snacks - Fruit Kebabs
This week we thought about things we can eat more of and things we should eat less of and things that were good for our teeth and body. The children used the healthy chef puppet and made plates of food that they thought were good choices
Another one of our activities was to make some fruit kebabs and as it is nearly time for King Charles’ Coronation we decided to try and use red white and blue fruits. The children carefully threaded their fruits onto the stick and then they could enjoy them at home as a healthy snack or after dinner treat
Super Tato saves the day!
This week our stories of the moment have been the Super Tato series, the children really enjoyed listening to the stories about how Super Tato saved the day and defeated the Evil pea!……And we were absolutely amazed when we arrived at playgroup on Friday to see that the Evil pea must have paid us a visit and trapped all of our veggies in the tuff tray! The children soon set to work helping to release the veggies and keeping an eye out in case the Evil Pea was still lurking around the playhouse. Mwahh Ha Ha Ha Haaah!
Mouth hand puppets
One of the interesting facts we found out is that children around 3 years old generally have 20 teeth, so we used our amazing counting skills to count 20 teeth to place inside our mouth hand puppets. These hand puppets also help us to develop our hand muscles too as it was quite tricky at first to coordinate our hands to be able to open and close the mouth.
Whose smile? Teeth Cleaning Packs and How much Sugar?
As part of our week we thought it was important for all children to have access to oral hygiene products and also have fun whilst cleaning their teeth, so every child received a teeth cleaning pack which contained a toothbrush, toothpaste a cleaning sticker chart and sticker. the children can then brush their teeth and place a sticker onto their chart, we are looking forward to seeing some sparkly clean teeth and completed sticker charts in the next month.
We also made a display of some of the children’s smiles so that we could have fun guessing whose smile was whose….. it was a little tricky to identify all of the smiles…. i wonder if anyone recognises any of the smiles.
Finally we also looked at the sugar content of many commercial snack foods aimed at young children….. we were amazed at how much sugar there was in some of the products on sale.
