Plough Green Pre-school
Dear Parents and Carers,
I hope that you have had a good week. The younger children have really enjoyed using the props from 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' to retell the story in their own way during free play. The older children have particularly enjoyed the arts and crafts table this week.
School / Nursery placements: If you have applied to a school or nursery for a place in September for your child, please can you let us know where they will be going so that we can help to prepare them for their transition next term.
Stories we are enjoying this week:
'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' by Eric Carle in the two year room. We have a lovely story sack with this book which was knitted by a grandma of one of our children.
'Little Red Riding Hood' illustrated by Sarah Jennings in the three/four year room (AM story) This is book nine from the NELI programme. This is a research based reading programme to support children's oral language development.
'Five Little Easter Bunnies' by Martha Mumford in the three/four year room (PM story) This is lift the flap book.
Screen time: As I am sure you will have seen in the news today, there is now scientific evidence that screen time is detrimental to young children's development. This is something that many of us working with young children have suspected for a long time. We have noticed a difference in children's attention spans and their speech and language development.
All of the staff at Plough Green are parent's ourselves and we know how hard parenting can be. For many of us, screens were not around when our own children were small so we understand how difficult it can be when you are trying to multi-task e.g. when preparing dinner or occupying younger siblings when your older ones are at clubs. We are not saying no screen time but please try to supervise and limit the time that your child is exposed to screens. Tracy and I attended an engagement event run by AfC Kingston on Thursday entitled Best Start in Life. It was sad to hear stories of children being put to bed at home with bedtime stories being told by machines/devices such as Alexa or Toniebox devices.
Over the holidays why not try and spend some time reading together for fun, not a necessity. It could be a comic or just looking at pictures in a factual book. Any why not play some simple board games together, taking it in turns to have a go. I am sure that many of you do these things already which is great but technology is slowly creeping into our lives more and more and a reminder that we are good enough parents without technology is surely a positive thing.
Note from the committee: Just a reminder that we have a Happy Bags collection booked for 14th April at 9.30am. (Unfortunately, we will not be able to take in any bags received after this time). If you have any bags you would like to drop off in your car we are having our stay and play session and staff training on Monday 13th April so staff will be there to take your bags from 8.30am to 2.30pm. (You can use any bags for donations.)
We would like to wish you all a very Happy Easter holiday and we look forward to seeing you when we return on Tuesday 14 April 🐤🐰
Plough Green 😁
Newsletter - 27 March 2026