Macclesfield Weekly Newsletter
3rd August 2012

Message from the Manager

Harri Howkins Centre Manager.

Another lovely busy week at the centre with beautiful sunshine one minute and rain the next, but we have still been out and about albeit it sun cream or rain coats!!

You may noticed our new sign up with the fruit platter asking for your child to only have 2 pieces. We have put this out to make sure that every child is getting some fruit no matter what time they are picked up. I hope you all understand that we are just trying to ensure that all children are able to enjoy the fruit and going forward we are going to make sure we have 2 fruit platter. However some children are here until 6pm and we want to ensure they have some to take home. Thank you.

Team Updates and Training

We would like to welcome Angela S to our team, Angela is our new Out of school club unit manager and comes to us with years of experience with this age group and is a fully qualified teacher.

Dates for the Diary

Zumba classes for adults are running 5.45 – 6.30 every Tuesday night £3.00 per class.

Manager Availablity w.c 06-08-12
	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
Harri	9:30-6:30	8:00-4:00	7:30-3:30	Day Off	9:30-6:30
In Charge	7:30-9:30 Alison B	7:30-8:00 Holly M 4:00-6:30 Alison B	3:30-6:30 Alison B	7:30-6:30 Alison B	7:30-9:30 Alison B

What the children have been enjoying this week

Babies

Kelly H - Unit Manager

This week the babies have been interested in stories and songs. We have been looking at picture books and been seeing what sounds the animals make on the farm.

We have also been singing lots of action songs and have encouraged the babies to join in with all the different actions. We have had lots of fun playing a naming game and have been finding out where our nose, eyes and tummy are. Now that summer has finally arrived please remember to bring a sun hat in for your child. Thank you.

Woddlers

Holly M - Unit Manager

We have been enjoying this lovely weather and to get into the summer spirit we did a delicious ice-cream tasting activity – our favourite flavour was the strawberry one! We have also been having fun decorating biscuits and getting very messy in the process.

We enjoyed a trip to the library to go and develop our knowledge on the animals we have been talking about in Woddler 1, by picking out some brilliant animal books and saying what noises they make which we are getting very good at! We have been making Olympic gold medals this week, it was so much fun and we love supporting our GB team!

Woddler 2 has been getting very messy with shaving foam fake snow and gloop. We have loved feeling all the different textures. We have really enjoyed building really tall, big towers using the big bricks and them pushing them over watching them fall, it has been very funny. In this lovely sunshine we have been playing in the sand pit pretending we are on holiday, at the beach building sand castles.

Toddlers

Jess M - Unit Manager

This week in Toddlers we have been getting very messy!!!
We have been covered head to toe in paint to create a huge floor painting, the children found this very exciting and liked the way the paint felt on their toes! We have also been looking for worms in the garden. We poured some soapy water on the soil to get the worms to come to the surface, which they did!

Toddlers took a trip to Macclesfield town centre to buy some lovely new table cloths and to spot what cars we could see on the road.
We have been very busy baking; we have made some lovely bread and chocolate butterfly cakes. We have also enjoyed having picnics outside and making musical shakers.

Preschool

Kim R - Unit Manager

Preschool have enjoyed extending their interest and learning about space this week by creating giant space rockets using chalk and boxes on the roof garden.

We have created a beautiful space collage for our new display, please feel free to pop in and take a look. We have been looking at non-fiction books that we collected during our visit to the library about space, baking and gardening. We have also had a great time baking biscuits and decorating them....yummy!

Message from the Early Years Teacher

This week we have been learning about the individual planets and looking at their distances from the sun. We have learned that the sun is the brightest object in our universe and that Saturn has rings around it.

We have been looking at posters and books all about space, and looking for letters that we recognise from our names. I has been quite good fun seeing just how many the letters appear within the text.

Activities for Home: Count how many times you see the sun shine over the weekend. You could make a tally chart and record your findings.

Out of School Club

Angela S - Unit Manager

We have had a very busy time in Holiday Club, we have been on a trip to Jodrell Bank which was very interesting and we have also been to Chester Zoo which was so much fun, we loved looking at all the animals. The bat cave was a little scary!

We have enjoyed playing outside in the sunshine and going to the park. We have been doing some exotic fruit printing and had a Chinese food tasting afternoon....it was delicious!! We have had soooo much fun playing on the roof garden. We had huge fishing rods and we were pretending to be pirates. We were looking for treasure and found a lost island which was very exciting. We also used our fishing rods as an Olympic torch and did lots of races.