Littleton Pre-school

Littleton Pre-school Situated in the beautiful village of Littleton, we are a committee-run, family-focused Pre-school, o Your child’s development is our priority.

Established in 1975, Littleton Pre-School is close to Winchester and is run by the community, supported by staff, voluntary helpers and a parental management committee. Our ethos is to provide a safe, happy, educational and caring environment where your child can flourish. Based in bright, modern and spacious facilities in the heart of the village, we are surrounded by idyllic countryside so there

is plenty of green, grassy space for your child to enjoy. We offer both indoor and outdoor sessions, making the most of the natural environment and our own private garden. Littleton Pre-School is OFSTED registered and has strong links with Sparsholt Primary School so the foundations are laid for your child’s future development. We welcome testimonials and all feedback. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any queries.

The end of an era, and one of the hardest posts to write!!This week saw the final days of Littleton Pre-school, a stalwa...
26/07/2024

The end of an era, and one of the hardest posts to write!!
This week saw the final days of Littleton Pre-school, a stalwart of the local community for nearly 50 years. It has been a heartbreaking few weeks for all involved, not least the dedicated staff team who have been with us for so many years. These amazing staff who have loved, nurtured and taught so many children and prepared them so well for their transition into school and for life beyond.
Sadly though, there are a number of reasons that Pre-school could no longer remain sustainable in the current climate and the decision had to be taken to close.
We will all miss being such a wonderful part of the Littleton community. We will miss our lovely, bright home in the Memorial Hall. We will miss using the whole recreation ground as our outdoor play area. We will miss greeting members of the community when out and about. We will miss visiting the Church for special events. We will miss laying our handmade wreath at the war memorial. We will miss walking to the Phonebox Library. We will miss visiting the Mobile Home Park. We will miss going to Flowerdown Barrow. We will miss watching people play tennis. We will miss climbing the trees. We will miss rolling down the hills. We will miss learning about nature, the birds and the bugs.
But most of all we will miss the children and the joy they brought to every day.
There have been challenges, there have been behaviours that we haven't liked. But primarily there has been laughter every single day we have been there.
There are literally thousands of pictures we could use to showcase how wonderful our Pre-school was , but the one with this post sums us up. Happy staff, doing whatever they can to make sure the children have a fabulous time. How many people can say they have dressed up as Superduck at work?
Thank you for supporting us over the years. Whilst the staff team are devastated, we are all immensely proud to have been a part of the history and legacy that was Littleton Pre-school. ###

20th May is World Bee Day and we took this opportunity to learn as much as we could about these vitally important insect...
21/05/2024

20th May is World Bee Day and we took this opportunity to learn as much as we could about these vitally important insects. We learnt all about the different parts of a bee's body, how they have six legs, use the front two to clean their antannae and the back ones to collect the pollen and nectar. We learnt that only female bees sting. We learnt about where they live and how they make the honey.
We also learnt that bees are struggling this year due to the wet and windy weather we have had, which has destroyed a lot of the pollen and flowers that the bees rely on. We therefore thought about how we can help to support the bees by planting more flowers and making sure we take care of the flowers around us, not picking them, but leaving them for the bees.
Outside, we pretended we were bees collecting pollen and taking it back to the hive. We used bean bags as pollen and the children carried these back to the hive (a basket) in their socks.
Inside, we made our own hive from paper and then there were lots of bees hidden around the room that needed the children's help to get back to the hive.
Throughout the day, the children were able to tell us lots of the things they had learnt about bees, hopefully we have a few more bee protectors amongst us as it is so vital we support these really important insects.

Today we learnt about St George's Day, which falls on 23rd April. First of all we went to the 'cinema' to watch a short...
22/04/2024

Today we learnt about St George's Day, which falls on 23rd April. First of all we went to the 'cinema' to watch a short film, courtesy of cBeebies, explaining about St George and the dragon, what it means to be English and the relevance of St George's Day. We are really thankful that we have a ceiling mounted projector and large screen that enables us to access these informative videos, which explain these important occasions much better than we can.
After that we made our own St George's flags using a variety of media, including paint, felt tip pens and tissue paper. The children drew along the edge of a ruler to make the cross and carefully filled it with red.
Outside, we searched for sticks to mount our flags on, and this enabled discussions around maths, using a blank sheet of paper the same size as our flags to measure whether the sticks we found were long enough.
The video also led to some children wanting to make shields, like the one George had when fighting the dragon.

Investigative play forms a large part of what we do at Pre-school. Yesterday we started the day by considering how to m...
21/04/2024

Investigative play forms a large part of what we do at Pre-school. Yesterday we started the day by considering how to make salt dough. What ingredients did we need? In what proportions do we need to measure them out? Initially, with some adult help, we made sure we got the measurements right and made salt dough, ready to cut into shapes to be decorated when it is dry. After that though, we really got into investigating what would happen if we added more flour or salt. And then what would happen of we added a lot more water? Apparently, according to one child, we were making slime! Perhaps that will be our next task?
When moving from indoors to outside, the children continued their exploration of modelling materials and found some natural clay which they dug out of the ground and manipulated into different shapes.

A pile of logs make a wonderful, natural climbing frame.They also enable children to risk assess their own play and work...
21/04/2024

A pile of logs make a wonderful, natural climbing frame.
They also enable children to risk assess their own play and work out how to navigate the logs when they wobble or move.

Who doesn't like blowing bubbles? Even as adults there is a special joy that bubbles bring. But for Pre-schoolers the ...
21/04/2024

Who doesn't like blowing bubbles? Even as adults there is a special joy that bubbles bring. But for Pre-schoolers the benefits are endless!
Blowing bubbles develops the small muscles in the mouth, strengthening the muscles that are important for developing clear speech sounds.
Reaching for the bubbles develops gross motor skills and also builds hand/eye co-ordination.
Playing with bubbles also supports cognitive development, teaching children about cause and effect when the bubbles pop upon touch or float too high to reach in the wind.
Maths concepts can also form part of bubble play as we discuss the different sizes of the bubbles, large ones and smaller ones, or how sometimes lots of bubbles are released from the wand whilst at other times only one or two escape.
Bubbles also encourage social connections as we laugh together as the bubbles float by and share the joy that bubbles bring.
Bubble play is cheap, a pot of bubbles can be picked up in the supermarket for pennies, and yet provide endless opportunities for fun and learning.

Yesterday we celebrated the end of the spring term with our traditional Easter Bonnet Parade where the children proudly ...
26/03/2024

Yesterday we celebrated the end of the spring term with our traditional Easter Bonnet Parade where the children proudly show off their creations to our audience of family members, before singing some age appropriate rhymes relating to Spring and Easter. We are so, so proud of every child at Pre-school, including those who performed for the very first time, or conquered their fears of standing in front of an audience.
At the end of the show, each child was rewarded with a mini Easter basket filled with little treats.
You may wonder (and we have been asked before) why we don't share pictures of the children's faces on our social media, especially on occasions like this when it would be wonderful to show everyone how amazing our children are. However, we strongly believe in protecting our children, especially their online identity and feel it is not our place to expose them to the risks that social media presents. We also feel that we do not need to use their faces to show what an amazing time we have.
We haven't quite reached the end of term yet, there are still a couple of days filled with fun to go, but when it does arrive we hope you have an amazing time.

After the past couple of days of horrendously wet and horrible weather, it was so good to spend some time up at the wood...
24/02/2024

After the past couple of days of horrendously wet and horrible weather, it was so good to spend some time up at the woods this morning.
We had been wondering for a while why some trees suddenly had some yellow paint on them, it turns out there was going to be some conservation work taking place and some of the over-populated poplar trees had to come down in order to let more light into the copse and encourage growth of other plants. We had a great time exploring the fallen trees, and the stumps that were left behind.
As always when we are at the woods, the children loved to show off their skills at tree climbing, and explore how far they could extend these skills before it became too risky. One child loved the fact he was dressed in green so was hidden in the tree. We talked about the word 'camouflage' and what it meant. After all, every play experience is also a time to learn 💚

Weaving can be a really useful activity for young children. It helps them to focus and concentrate. It teaches them pos...
24/02/2024

Weaving can be a really useful activity for young children. It helps them to focus and concentrate. It teaches them positional language such as over, under, up and down, plus experience of pattern which all support early maths development. It helps hand/eye co-ordination, and fine motor skills.
When we were given a large loom it was the perfect opportunity to put this into practice and we had a great time this morning, weaving the patterned strips through the loom to create an owl picture. The children were interested in the rainbow coloured wool in the box, so that will be our next weaving experience.

❤️❤️Happy Valentine's Day ❤️❤️We had a super time at Pre-school last week sharing the love! Our Rhyme of the Week was al...
14/02/2024

❤️❤️Happy Valentine's Day ❤️❤️
We had a super time at Pre-school last week sharing the love! Our Rhyme of the Week was all about different coloured hearts and we used this to talk about love, who or what we love and how love can be represented in so many different ways, from being kind, sharing, and promoting friendship.
Our Love Tree helped us to practice our fine motor skills by hooking the hearts on, and also adding a variety of different hearts and other different materials.
We used role play to enable two children to represent reporters from the local newspaper who were carrying out research on love. Our intrepid reporters travelled the room, asking each child and grown up what they loved. With the help of a grown up these answers were transferred to heart shapes, cut by the children using our die cutting machine, and pasted onto a board by our reporters for all to read and see. Our budding journalists were very proud of their work and shared it at Gathering time where we explored all the answers.
We're half way through the half term break, and whilst it is good to be able to share today with our families, we cannot wait to get back to Pre-school next week for many more fun adventures with our LOVE-ly Pre-schoolers 😍

Happy Lunar (Chinese) New Year! 🐉We have had so much fun over the past couple of weeks learning about this special cele...
10/02/2024

Happy Lunar (Chinese) New Year! 🐉
We have had so much fun over the past couple of weeks learning about this special celebration. We have embraced a variety of different oriental foods, including using a spiraliser to prepare vegetables for a noodle stir fry. We have played a game of trying to pick up prawn crackers using chopsticks and some of the children were amazingly adept at this!
We have watched videos that explain all about how the New Year is celebrated, and we observed that many of the traditions are similar to those of Christmas, including putting special decorations up, cleaning the house, eating special foods and giving gifts. We learnt about the relevance of red envelopes that children receive, and we made our own red envelopes using an envelope making tool. We adapted how the envelopes are given slightly, and turned it into one of our favourite games - Hide & Seek, where the dragon had hidden lots of coins around the room for the children to find and place in their envelopes. On Friday we had a special snack of lots of colourful foogds, laid out on a special red tablecloth. We also did a Cosmic Yoga session focussed on the Lunar New Year. And of course, we enjoyed some dragon dancing, incorporating traditional music, accompanied by our own interpretations too.

'Team work makes the dream work' was our motto this afternoon.Yesterday the children had made a dragons' fire as we have...
08/02/2024

'Team work makes the dream work' was our motto this afternoon.
Yesterday the children had made a dragons' fire as we have been learning about the Lunar New Year all week, and the fact this year will be the year of the dragon. Today we decided to move the pile of sticks back to the wooded area. Many of the sticks were large branches so took more than one child to lift them, so they all worked together and cleared them in no time at all. There was lots of loud chatter as they worked, deciding how to lift the branches, and they definitely made a few passers by smile at their antics.
We decided that one of the largest branches looked like a dragons face at the end so we carried it back to Pre-school, ready for our New Year dragon dancing tomorrow.
After all the rain this morning, the ground was very wet and slippy in places, and all this hard work sometimes meant the children lost their footing, slipping over in the mud. With any kind of physical labour, the workers had carried out a risk assessment beforehand and decided it was safe. We suspect (know?!) the vast majority of slips in the mud were deliberate!

Address

Winchester

Opening Hours

Monday 8:30am - 12:15pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 3pm
Thursday 8:30am - 3pm
Friday 8:30am - 12:15pm

Telephone

07765916006

Website

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