At Portland House this term we are excitedly enjoying learning about the different people within our communities who help us and some of the job roles that they do and we are especially looking forward to some special visitors coming to see us to share with us the important things they do at work and how this helps us all.
On Monday 8th November we had tremendous fun meeting a special visitor, it was the local postman. He brought his van into the car park to show us what was inside and explain to us what jobs he has to do every day. The postman told us he was called Harrison and he has a very busy job working for the Royal Mail delivering lots of letters and packages to our houses.
The children knew what job he did by his postal uniform and of course the trademark red van. ‘It’s got a crown on it’ said one child. They all said that they had a postman or postlady that came to their house to bring their post.
When the children were asked for ideas what they thought would be in the back of the post van some of their guesses were ‘a roller coaster’ whilst another thought there would be an ‘excavator’. Although these were interesting guesses we suspected they were wishful thinking ideas, the children did correctly guess that there would be letters and boxes inside.
When Harrison opened his van doors the children were curious to investigate its contents which was full of letters and parcels he had collected from the sorting office in town ready to start his daily deliveries. We talked about what happens to our post when we are sending letters and parcels and how the post men/ladies have to have special keys to collect what’s locked inside the post boxes around the community to take them to the sorting offices. There were different sized keys for the different types of post boxes. We learnt that sometimes things can be put inside them that really shouldn’t be in there such as chocolate wrappers and other litter which the children said should go in the bins instead.
We also saw the special scanner that is uses for the parcels which records when they have been delivered, we learnt that he knows exactly where to take his post by reading the addresses. Some children enjoyed having a go at lifting his post bag with a few letters inside but everyone’s absolute favourite thing was having a turn at sitting in the front of the post van and having a little beep of the horn and working out how to put the music on for a little boogie-woogie.
The preschool children are currently busy getting crafty making some special things to send in the post and we are looking forward to taking them to pop into our local post box across the road.
