Pre-school

Miss Cascayan is supported by Ms Logan and Miss Odom.

Curriculum

At St. Helen’s we are committed to developing the whole child through a broad and balanced curriculum. We ensure that we cover all areas of the Early Years Outcomes.

Supporting Learning at Home

We recognise the extremely important role that parents play in their child’s education. We want to work in partnership to help parents develop their skills supporting their child’s learning at home. If parents would like any support with developing home learning please see Miss Cascayan.

What you can do to help

Talk to your children about daily activities so that they hear language all the time. Children learn language very quickly if they are using it all the time.
Take your children to the park and allow them time to socialise with other children of a similar age.
Read a story to your child at bedtime every day.
Talk about letters and numbers on posters that they see in the environment or on buses.

Home –School Library

We have a small library available for children and parents to choose books together for reading at home. You and your child change the book on a weekly basis.

Learning Library

We also have a learning library, where you can borrow activities to enjoy together with your children at home. We ask that when your child is using borrowed items that a parent or carer works with them to enhance learning and avoid them from getting damaged or losing pieces.
The Learning library includes puzzles, games, painting equipment, drawing equipment and play dough equipment.

Parental engagement

At the end of the Autumn and Spring terms parents are invited to our coffee morning. This is an opportunity to look at your child’s work and observations and to speak with the Pre-school staff.

Pre-school Expectations and Assessment

There are 2 types of assessments carried out during the children's time in Nursery using the Government non-statutory guidance materials - Development Matters and Birth to 5. Firstly, there's Formative Assessment which is on-going, the staff do this on a daily basis through observations and conversations with the children to make decisions about what they have learnt or can do already so as to help them move on in their learning journey. Secondly there are Summative Assessments, these are carried out at certain points of the year and are used to track attainment and progress.

Photos and News

The Pre-school children have enjoyed many exciting and fun activities this half term. We have been focusing on caring for others, being kind and offering our helping hands. We have been learning about people who help us and became vets in our Veterinary Surgery role play helping to heal all our injured cuddly animal toys. We’ve also become doctors too and helped our poorly classmates.
Cash, Molly, Chip and Indy the dogs have all come to visit us in Pre-school to help us with our learning. They have helped us understand the importance of caring for all of God’s creatures and how we can do that. We even got to refill the bird feeders in the pond area with Miss Morgan so they won’t go hungry. Once the feeders were full we used the binoculars to see which birds would come to eat.
We’ve been learning more about shapes and playing with them to build and create pictures. We used some 3d shapes and fit them together like a puzzle, making people and buildings. We also did some mark making by drawing around them practicing how to draw straight lines and curves.
We have been busy cooking and baking some delicious treats for us to enjoy in class. We chopped up some apples and pears, then used our hands to mix the ingredients up for the topping when we made our scrumptious crumble. It was so yummy!

Click here to see the pre-school classroom activities.

We learnt about Chinese New Year and prepared a small banquet by slicing up the vegetables for our noodles. We tried to use chopsticks to eat them with, it wasn’t easy so some of us needed to use a fork instead.
We did our walk in the park and were joined by our parents and some of our friends from year 6 as we walked one lap around Hermit Road park with the whole school.
French Day was so much fun. We wore clothes that were the colours of the French flag and purchased some French snacks when we went to visit the French market. Our friends in year 5 came over and helped to teach us the French words of the French flag colours. We also got to enjoy some traditional French crepes made by one of our parents who is from France. They were très bon!
We have been singing lots of nursery rhymes with our Pre-school teachers and used the instruments to make the rhythms for when we sing. We’ve been having such a great time singing and dancing around with each other. It’s so much fun when we get to do this all together.