may 2026 Update

It was very exciting to welcome to our Pre-school Helene Phillips, author of ‘Bog and the Paper Boat’, visiting last week. We split into two smaller groups for the session and Helene read her book to all in attendance.

The children loved the wonderfully imaginative story about the adventures of a man called ‘Bog’. Helene helped to make the story come alive using her props for Bog and paper boats that we had made ready for the event. The children helped with other props during the story by using their hands to create a ‘rock’ and then an ‘iceberg’. Many of the children wanted to use scissors to bravely reshape their paper boat as happened in the story, creating something new that was perfect for the giant!

After the story the children used coloured pens and crayons to decorate some more paper boats, then following discussions about what we thought could happen, we all went outside to test the boats (at creator‘s risk!) floating them on water in our large water tray.

We will be revisiting this lovely story in future weeks.

Tadpoles

We have been learning all about frogspawn, tadpoles, froglets and frogs. We then met the preschool tadpoles! We are going to observe them over the next few weeks and see how they grow and develop before we set them free.

The children helped set up some props to create a ‘pond’ with a log for 5 little speckled frogs.

We sang the song together and each child had a turn to make a frog jump into the pond at the appropriate moment. We then all counted together to see how many were left. The children did some great counting and used their fingers to represent numbers.

After singing the song we looked at a set of models showing the lifecycle of a frog, identifying together the changes at each stage from frogspawn to fully grown frog.

Ladybirds

As part of our learning around life cycles, we have been looking at ladybirds. The children have been looking at their features and painting some lovely representations.

They have also enjoyed painting ‘ladybird’ pebbles, adding spots and eyes to their pebble stones.

We are looking forward to some real life ladybirds and caterpillars being delivered to our Pre-School after half term.