Newsletters

Little Stars Christian Preschool

Newsletter February 2023

Dear Parents and carers

We hope you had a lovely half term – welcome back to the busiest of half terms as we have only 5 weeks and many festivals and events to fit in before Easter😊

Outdoor Area

We have had such an exciting time at Little Stars – we started the outdoor area refurbishment – which has paused for 2 weeks as Mr Rouse is busy, but will start again next week. Our next step is to get the sand in and start on the chalk boards. It will take a while for the contents of the learning area to come.

The children have loved “helping” and have enjoyed some lovely role play around building and tools.

If anyone has an hour or two free to help us by varnishing the shed “learning area” we would be super grateful.

Staffing

We have really exciting news – Mrs Kat Watson has been appointed as Deputy Manager, Kat is an experienced manager of a nurture nursery and a family support worker with the children centre, before she had a small break to have her children. We are all delighted that she is ready for the challenge, and I am grateful for her support recently as she has taken on some of the workload.

We are also looking for a part time pre-school practitioner to start by 17^th April – please spread the word and share our Facebook post, it would suit a returning to work early years teacher.

Sadly, the date for Mrs Hayes retirement is coming closer – she leaves us at the end of the term 31^st March, although she will remain on our bank staff books… watch this space for details about her dinosaur themed leaving party 😊

The next two weeks

We are focussing on communication and language, stories and reading books with the children. All of the children will be given a folder with a book to take home and share, which you can come in and change each day with your child. Please support this, if you have to dash to work – we will change the book with your child for you.  It would be lovely to hear if you liked the story or pictures – you can pop a message on Facebook in the comments from Tuesday onwards.

We welcome over the next 2 weeks any families who speak another language to come and read a simple story in their language to our children – it is so important for all the children to hear stories in various languages but our skills don’t quite stretch that far 😊

On Wednesday 1^st March – we will celebrate Romanian Spring Day (and St David’s Day) with crafts around flowers… it would be fab to have one of our Romanian families to come and show us anything about Romania – a flag, a story, a craft a photo – just chat to the staff.

Thursday 2^nd March

World Book Day – we invite the staff and children to bring in a favourite book, and if they want to they can dress up as a character from a book.

Week commencing 6^th March

We continue with communication, celebrating Chatter Matters week, where again we focus on language development, ‘to and fro’ conversation, building up sentences and more.

Tuesday 7^th March – we welcome parents in at 9.30am to join us in some Chatter Matter songs (more information later)

Wednesday 8^th March

We celebrate Holi – please send your child in old clothes as we plan a lot of paint splatting. – it would be fabulous to have our Indian families come and share dancing or costumes or photos 😊

Bags 2 school

Our next collection will be on Wednesday 8^th March, so if you are having a clear our please bring any bags in by Tuesday 7^th.

The bag 2 School scheme collects the following ‘good quality’ items for re-use:

• Men’s, Ladies and Children’s clothing (no school uniform with logo)
• Paired shoes (tied together or elastic band around)
• Handbags
• Hats & bags
• Scarves, belts & ties
• Jewellery
• Lingerie
• Soft toys
• Towels, curtains & bed linen

The scheme then pays Little Stars according to the weight of items collected!

Week commencing 13^th March

Monday 13^th March we have arranged a visit to the library – we will need your help to get the children back from the library and support us there too. We will meet at the library at 9.30 (most families) and will need hep to get the children back from the library and to support on the visit too. We will send out a separate note later this week.

We will celebrate Mothers’ Day and St Patrick’s Day

The last 2 weeks of term we will be concentrating on Easter learning and fun and a lot of dinosaur fun in the last week 😊

Thursday 30^th March

Easter celebration in church in the morning and a very exciting dinosaur leaving party for Mrs Hayes – more details later

Regency run Marshals Sunday April 2^nd 8.00 am to 11.30 am – Can you help us?

We are looking for Marshals again for the Regency run – hopefully we can get a team of 5 people to help and this raises funds for Little Stars. We have the opportunity to raise between £250 and £500 just for standing in the sun (hopefully) and directing people around the race 😊

Places for September and any extra hours needed for this academic year

If you were planning on increasing your hours from April, please talk to Sara as soon as possible as many sessions are filling and the phone is ringing with new enquiries.

We will be asking you later this half term to let us know about your intentions in September so we can plan. Please promote Little Stars to potential families, especially any 3 year olds

Love from Sara Rouse and all of the Little Stars Team 

01926 477597

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