Waterbeach Feast and child led activities

Week beginning 3rd June 2024

Community playgroups like ours are parent led and community driven, we believe that as adults we should   help our children to be proud of their village and surrounding areas and become active supportive members of  the community. To embed this we try to take part in events and activities around the  village and local area.

So this week at playgroup we have been focussing on creating costumes and decorations so our children can take part in the village Feast. This year’s theme was  something beginning with P so our children chose the pilots and plane theme. We have been busy making plane costumes, banners and plane themed decorations for the stall. We want all children to be able to access this lovely event should they wish to so work hard to make all of the costumes at playgroup, therefore there was lots of painting, colouring, sticking and cutting going on. The children had an absolutely fantastic time at the Feast and were excitedly talking about their experiences the following week and beyond.

Apart from Feast preparations we also followed lots of our children’s interests this week when planning so we spent time looking at mini beast, things growing in our garden, created lots of art work and storyboards and also created junk model rockets following an interest in a story about a child going to the moon and the song zoom zoom zoom we’re going to the moon.

Another busy week at Community Playgroup.

Oral health and healthy eating week

Week beginning 10th June 2024

This week at playgroup we were thinking about oral health and healthy eating. We had  lots of fun activities to help the children learn about the importance of good oral health and tooth brushing and also making sure the snacks and food we eat are not too sugar laden.

Each day the children made a healthy recipe that incorporated some of our 5 a day or is more tooth friendly than many of the snacks marketed at children.

These included   smoothies, fruity sheet pancake, carrot stars, homemade humous and veggies and sugar free muffins The children all enjoy cooking at playgroup so we’ve put together a little recipe book for each child with the recipes we made this week so that they could  try some of them at home.

We also looked at the amount of sugar that some of our favourite snack and lunchbox items have in them, carefully weighing out the equivalent amount of sugar the children could really see just how much hidden sugar there is and why it’s so important to brush our teeth.

To help the children with cleaning their teeth they all took a special teeth cleaning pack  with a toothbrush, toothpaste and a sticker chart so that they could  track their brushing. We asked parents to encourage their child to brush at least twice daily and record it on their charts.

Bringing home these activities and encouraging family discussions can help children to extend their learning and further embed good practices.

Exploring Summer and Transitions

Week beginning 17th June 2024

As the summer term continues many of our children have begun taking short holidays or day trips with their families so there is lots of chatter about what they’ve been doing. With this in mind we decided to incorporate a summer theme to our learning intentions which are focussing on school readiness for the rising fives and developing both our gross and fine motor skills for the younger children. Many of our activities this week focussed on working together, number recognition, and also developing our fine motor skills. 

It was also international picnic day on the 18th June so we had lots of role play and other activities set up around this theme, it was lovely to watch the children play, some demonstrating first hand experiences whilst others engaged in more fantasy based play pulling in different resources to facilitate their play. The playgroup teddy bears really enjoyed their picnics too!  

As our rising fives ready themselves for their transitions to primary school we ensure that they have lots of fun activities which help support their skills they need, like mark making. Lots of our children have incorporated mark making in their play since they were very small and so are now very interested in being able to write their names and label their pictures so we spent time exploring pre writing shapes and had activities to help strengthen their hand muscles like pipettes and tweezers which will make holding and manipulating pencils easier and more comfortable.