During June the children at Daisy Chain explored outer space. We painted planets, made moon rock cakes, built rockets from junk boxes and joined up the stars in constellations to help our pencil control.
However most exciting of all, to celebrate Fathers Day we invited Dads, Uncles, and Grandads in to play. They all had a wonderful time joining in with all the activities, playing in the garden, making cakes, building rockets and planets, investigating snails and playing pirates.
Daisy Chain has an OpenDoor policy this means family members are welcome to come and play at any time it doesn’t have to be for a special occaision. Just speak to a member of staff and arrange a date.

We explored Spring, planting and growing.
The role play area became a Potting Shed
The water tray had soil and mini beasts in.

We planted sunflower, bean and cress seeds.

We extended our numeracy skills through counting and sorting bugs and beetles and practised our hand and eye co ordination skills when making bean stalks by threading paper leaves on long straws.

but the children think it’s hilarious.
It gives a different meaning to being’ a bit tied up with work !’

We all had great fun being very creative on St. George’s day. As it was a sunny day we went in the garden to make a giant dragon out of junk , paint and coloured paper.We really enjoyed ourselves and didn’t get too messy.
We also enjoyed hearing the story of St. George saving the princess.

During March the children have been exploring things using their senses and learning some Nursery Rhymes .
They enjoyed trying out all kinds of musical instruments and listening to their different sounds.The violin was a big hit and the electronic guitar.
We looked at textures and made feely books. We felt how soft Angel the visiting guinea pig was. Her sister Scruffy did not like being at pre- school and preferred to stay in her cage!
We baked jam tarts and smelt them cooking and looked at how they had changed.

We thought about Mother’s Day and talked about how our Mummies helped us and why we loved them.The comments were very varied from ‘I love my Mummy because she gives me hugs and kisses.’ to ‘I love my Mummy because she gives me apples, I love green apples.’
When the children were asked what their Mummies did for them when they were babies several said that their Mummy put them in their cot but one or two commented ‘She bathed me in the sink ’cause I was too little.’
On Friday 20th. lots of Mums and Grannies and Aunties came to visit and enjoyed decorating little Mother’s Day cup cakes together with the children.

The children and ladies were excited by the snowy weather and the pre-school managed to stay open through out the week.
We built snow ladies and a snow bear, tried sledging in the garden and the car park and had fun throwing snowballs

As every one settled back into the new term we began looking at our new focus topic of ‘Under the Sea ‘.
The children enjoyed the story ‘A commotion in the ocean.’ and we explored various activities: hand print jelly fish, penguin bowling(no peguins were harmed during this activity.) draw what you can see out of a port hole, floating and sinking and measuring sea creatures. To name but a few.

We also celebrated Chinese New Year.
At snack time we tried eating noodles with chop sticks and tasted prawn crackers.
We dressed up in Chinese clothes and ‘cooked’ in a wok in the role play area.
The children made fans, lucky red envelopes,and Chinese dragons
.It was very exciting at story time as we learnt how to say some Chinese words and tried Dragon Dancing.

During December the children at Daisy Chain preschool , Westbury helped make decorations for their tree which was part of the All Saints Church Christmas tree festival. On Wednesday the 10th.Staff took the children who attended the afternoon session tothe church to decorate their tree and look around.The tree looked delightful covered in strings of daisies.

The setting was busy making cards and pinecone decorations,paper chains and most exciting of all playing with the new magic snow bought for us by Sarah our playleader.We couldn’t believe our eyes as we added the water to the powder and watched it transform in to snow as we stirred it around.

One Monday morning Father Christmas came to play so that the children could get used to him before the Christmas party.We felt in the setting that their experience of Father Christmas is so brief that it would be nice for the children to spend a little longer with him and overcome their fears.This was a great succes,the children were delighted with their visitor.He played with the playdough, made jigsaws, read lots of stories and built robots with the mega blocks. The children who were nervous had made friends with Father Christmas by the end of the morning and were reluctant to let him go.

We had another outing on Tuesday the 16th. Westbury Infants school had kindly invited us to watch the Reception class nativity play.Thanks to a kind band of willing parent helpers we were able to attend.We couldn’t have gone without them as the ratio is 2 chidren to 1 adult when we leave the setting.We really enjoyed the peformance which was very sweet and our children behaved really well especially as it was a completely new experience for most of them.

Our own Nativity play was a retelling of the Christmas story in the children’s own words. After reading the story to the children several times and acting it out with the Playmobil figures we asked them to tell us what happened and they drew pictures of the characters. This was read out to the parents as the children came on stage in their costumes, led by the staff in their costumes.One of the most amusing comments made by the children was the list of gifts for baby Jesus apparently he had ‘Gold, shampoo and two cups.’

The last session of the year was our Christmas party.Around 30 children attended. We had dancing and catching bubbles followed by pass the parcel. A party lunch and then excellent entertainment was provided by chidren’s entertainer Dave Hickory who had us all in stitches of laughter. Father Christmas arrived to hand out presents to all. There were squeals of delight as the gifts were opened and every one was happy to take their presents from Father Christmas thanks to his previous visit.One little boy even said ‘Bye Father Christmas see you at Longleat.’

We return to preschool on Monday 5th. January 2009 and our focused activities will be on the theme of a ‘Commotion in the ocean’ looking at under water creatures, the seaside,pirates and mermaids.