Week beginning 5th January 2026
Our First Week of 2026 Together
Our first week back together after the Christmas holidays was spent welcoming new children to community playgroup and exploring lots of fun messy play and favourite activities. We believe that children learn and explore best when they feel safe, secure and settled so having familiar, exciting resources and activities on offer provides a gentle transition back into preschool follow the hustle and bustle of the holidays. The children enjoyed tea parties, potions, creating with play dough, scooping, pouring and construction with sand and shaving foam. We dipped back into feelings and emotions exploring changes and how they make us feel and also explored sharing and turn taking. It was a very busy week and brought lots of excitement. Not least because we also had a dusting of snow which we quickly incorporated into our play!
Come back next week when we will be continuing to explore snow and ice
Week beginning 12th January 2026.
All things snow and ice
Inspired by our recent snow and how excited the children were by it we spent this week looking at snow and ice. Thinking about what we can see, feel and experience when the weather is cold. We had lots of exploration trays looking at how to melt ice, animals that live in cold climates, having a go at trying to create our own ice igloos and also lots of scooping pouring and mark making opportunities. Some of our children enjoy hot chocolate when the weather is cold so our play dough this week was chocolate scented, which made the playhouse smell lovely. We spent time looking at shapes in snowflakes and also practiced our scissors skills, with some icicle cutting and mark making using winter shapes.
As another busy week closes we are all looking forward to next week when we join in the Great British Bird Watch Week
Week beginning 19th January 2026
Great British Bird Watch Week
This week at Community Playgroup we joined in the Great British Bird Watch and looked at the different birds in our garden. We thought about what they might eat, because as the weather is cold many of the birds food sources are scarce. We spent time looking at what foods we could find in our garden, and although we found a few tasty treats there certainly wasn’t enough to sustain the birds so we made some shape bird feeders for the playgroup garden and also our own homes. We had lots of other bird related fun from creating birds nest soup to rescuing the insects from the gloopy mud. We created our very own birds using play dough and paper plates and created our amazing colourful birds display. Our cooking activity this week was Chocolate and Cranberry weetabix bars weighing,mixing and squishing our mixture into the tin was great fun! We also made some flying birds using ping pong balls and crepe paper. The children then all had a go at throwing their birds to see how far they could throw them….. the furthest was almost 3 meters which is fantastic!
Come back next week when we explore some of our favourite rhymes and stories
Week beginning 26th January 2026
Some more of our favourite Rhymes and Stories
This week we have been concentrating on language and increasing our repertoire of rhymes and stories with repeated refrain. We explored some more of our favourites which included Baa baa black sheep Zoom zoom zoom we’re going to the Moon The Gruffalo The 3 little pigs We’re going on a bear hunt We colour matched and counted bears, built bear caves, explored space rocks, made Gruffalo crumble, constructed houses for the 3 little pigs and made a woolly coat for a sheep. At circle time we read the stories and sang the rhymes together. Rhymes and repeated refrains give children a chance to join in, learn new language, develop concentration and understanding and lays down the foundations for a life of enjoying reading and storytelling We hope you enjoyed looking at what we got up to….. come back next week where we will be exploring numbers together
