Pre-School 2025 - 2026

Welcome to Pre-School Summer Term 2 2025 

Date for your diary for Reception 2026 starters: Pre-School Graduation Thursday 2nd July 2:15pm in the school hall.

If your child is graduating from Pre-School this term then please look out for the letter listing all the details about our leaver’s celebration performance. You will receive a paper copy of this. Please complete the slip attached and return to us asap. 

We will be starting our second Summer Term topic 'Pond life...who's egg is it?' please enjoy looking at the topic web in the file section below.

We have lots to look forward to this half-term including two weeks with our hatching eggs and caring for the small chicks as they hatch! Our Chick eggs- arrive in Pre-School on Monday the 8th June, please complete the consent box on Scopay and your donation will gratefully be accepted.

• Routines, Reminders & Messages for Children starting Reception in September

  • Pre-School Graduation/Leavers Celebration - Thursday the 2nd of July at 2:15pm. You will receive further information about this via letter, all Pre-School children going up to Reception are invited to take part.
  • Graduation Photos- Look out for the letter and order form for your child's Graduation photo, we will be dressing each child in a hat and gown for the photo!
  • Move-Up Days - The children going to Reception in September will be spending some time with their new teachers this half-term.  They will visit on Wednesday 17^th of June, Thursday the 25th June and Wednesday 1^st of July.  All visits will take place during the school day
  • Book Bags- Last few weeks taking a new book home to read. Please look out for the memo when we will be requesting books back wk commencing the 7th of July and ensuring all news books are shared and returned to you.
  • Phase 1 Phonics- We will be learning about how to 'blend pure sounds' together to create each word we have segmented. We will learn how to blend them together to say the word. Each week I will add a list of words that we have been practising in our sessions, you will find this in your child's new phonics folder

Tapestry Learning Journey - If you are new to Tapestry as a family then please look out for an email with instructions on how to get started by the end of this week. If your child has an older sibling and you already have an Tapestry login then please reactivate your previous account, it will be accessible by the end of this week. If your child attends another setting we can share accounts with the other setting with your permission. If your child had a previous account at another setting then we can continue their Learning Journey by accessing a Key Code from the manager, please contact your previous setting and ask the manager to email Rode Heath Admin with the key code and we can then transfer the data to our Pre-School. As always, please let us know if you have any problems.

Week Commencing: Monday 1st June 2026

'This week we will explore...What is a pond?' 

Communication & Language:

This week we will enjoy the story 'Don’t wake the Bear Hare' by Steven Smallman and Caroline Pedler. As we read through this story we will practise saying ‘please don’t wake the bear’. We will enjoy finding out all about the bear and the springtime party. We will answer questions like what will he eat? What jobs do the animals do to get ready for the party?

   Personal, Social & Emotional Development:

This week we will be practising using positive words and kindness. We will use the strategy of ‘colour friendship bears’ and talk about how different friendship bears help each other through tricky times. This week we will be having a simple discussion about what a good friend can do and look at the important words that Happy Yellow Bear says: ‘This teddy is cheerful and has a big smile. He is very kind and likes to help his friends. He loves to wave and cuddle. This teddy likes to make new friends with other teddies and boys and girls and to make them feel happy too. Would you like to have a friend like Happy Teddy Bear?’.

Physical Development:

This week we will continue to practise our ball skills, throwing and catching, rolling and batting. We will also be starting new pencil challenges including writing our names from memory We will focus on pencil grip and starting points for our capital letter and lower-case letters. This week we will continue practising our cutting skills using our dominant hand. We will try to hold the scissors using the correct finger positioning, thumb at the top and cut along a straight line. We will complete the the balloon party challenge.

Literacy:

This week we will enjoy the rhyming story 'Please don’t wake the Bear. We will focus on the characters in the story and what happens first, in the middle and at the end. We will enjoy the repeating phrase and make a chain of rhyming words that sound like POP. We will be focussing on moving across the page of a book from left to right and begin to discuss what happened at the beginning and the end of the story. We wil focus focussing on hearing and saying our new letter sound: f, for fairy, f for fun, f for forest and think about the initial sounds for the name sof the woodland animals.

Phonics:

This week we will have lots of fun exploring how to make the pure sound 'f', have a look at the I spy game and the pure sounds poster to show you how to make this sound in your child’s book bag. This week we will be practising the rhyming CVC words pet, net, jet and vet. Practise segmenting each word into its individual sounds v-e-t, then blend together ‘vet’. What other words can you think of to add to the rhyming chain?

  Mathematics:

This week we will sing rhymes to 5 and join in with movements. We will move props to 5  and back from 5 including moving our 5 little ducks and 5 Speckled Frogs in our small world and tough tray play areas. We will begin to begin to count 5 objects using one-to-one correspondence and match numerals to quantities when acting out songs.

    Understanding the World:

This week we will explore the different places in the story, the forest especially, and ask have we ever seen them? What do they look like, how do we interact with those places in our countryside? We will also talk about what party invitations look like and what springtime parties would be like in a forest with the animals, how do we celebrate birthdays?

   Expressive Arts & Design:

This week we will enjoy making party invitations, creating party designs and making a fairy wand to take to the party using different weaving techniques.

We know that the first few weeks at Pre-School can be a bit of a scary time, even for mums and dads! If you have any worries then please come and talk to us- mornings at the door can be a bit busy but we have more time to talk at the end of the day. Please email the office directly if you would like a phone call or a meeting.

Our door is always open, please contact us for help at any time.  At busy times, please telephone to leave a message or email and we will respond as soon as we can.