Friday 14th December – Nursery Christmas Party.  Children are welcome to wear party clothes

Wednesday 19th December – Nursery Christmas Performance and Church visit.  Please remember the earlier drop off time on this day.  All family members are welcome to join us at the church at 10.15 (am children) and 2.15 (pm children.  Please remember that all children should be collected from the church on this day.

Friday 21st December – last day of nursery.  Happy Christmas! 🙂 

Monday 7th January – nursery/school resumes

As part of our dinosaurs topic, the children were eager to learn about volcanoes.  They found out more about them using books and through play activities.  A highlight of the dinosaur topic was making volcanoes in the forest using diet coke and mentoes.  This is an easy science experiment for you to try at home.  Please ask your children more about it.

We will be making our own volcanoes in the nursery garden soon!

The parent focus group suggested that the nursery support a food bank this year instead of a Christmas raffle.

We will be supporting the Cults Kirk Centre with their ‘Reverse Advent Food Bank.’  This involves gifting something to people in need during advent.  The Kirk Centre are supporting Aberdeen Cyrenians and Instant Neighbour.

We are now collecting a variety of non-perishable food and non-food items.  Nursery staff will deliver these to ‘The Hub’ on Wednesday 19^th December.

We welcome donations of:

• Non-perishable food: jars of pasta sauce, cereals, tins, biscuits, Christmas treats, soups
• Toiletries
• Baby items: baby food, wipes, nappies (older sizes: 5, 6)

The nursery staff observe the children to determine their areas of interest.  This is often how a new topic begins.

Recently, the children had been talking about dinosaurs in their play.  These children had the opportunity to plan a dinosaur topic using the talking tub.  The talking tub is designed to give the children prompts when sharing what they already know and what they want to learn.  It also allows staff to find out misconceptions children might have about certain topics.

The children helped to choose activities and play resources that they would like to explore in the nursery.  Their key areas of interest were: bones (human and dinosaur), volcanoes and meat/plant eaters.  Activities in nursery have focused on these areas.  Please see our planning books for more information.

We have been learning about different celebrations.  Recently, we have been focusing on Diwali.  We watched videos and read stories about how children celebrate Diwali in our country.  We found out that fireworks are a big part of their celebrations.  We compared the Diwali festivities to festivals that we celebrate in our own homes.

The morning children had a special visit from Sanat’s mummy.  She shared with us how her family celebrate Diwali.  She read us a story about Rama and Sita and, with Sanat, explained what Diwali was all about.

We also had a special Diwali snack and tasted lots of different foods.

We made candle holders as part of the celebrations.  Happy Diwali Everyone!

The nursery Christmas performance will take place on Wednesday 19th December.  This involves a visit to the church where the nursery children will perform a short selection of songs.  This is always a wonderful celebration and a highlight of the nursery year.  A special jolly, red visitor will also attend!

Please invite Grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends to cheer us on!  🙂

The nursery Christmas party will take place on Friday 14th December.  This is an event that takes place inside nursery and parents do not attend.  

More information to follow.

We try to utilise the outdoor environment on an almost daily basis.  On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the children have the option to sign-up for outdoor activities.  We also take advantage of wet, windy and snowy weather on an ad hoc basis.  We regularly go sledging or jumping in muddy puddles.

Please ensure your child’s outdoor clothes and waterproofs are hanging on their peg and not in their bag.  This helps them to be as independent as possible when getting ready for outdoor play and it enables staff to clearly see which clothes each child has.  Thank you.

We hope to have photographs of our ‘Welly Walk’ up soon. We are waiting for our blog capacity to be increased.

Click here to see the rolling snack menu which is now in place.  This will continue for the first few weeks after the holidays. 

We would welcome your snack suggestions.  You can add your suggestions by replying to this post or adding them to our notice board.

We value parental opinion and regularly ask for feedback about general nursery matters.  We do this by asking you informally to comment on plans, trips, events, snack, at parent’s evening, during daily informal chats etc.  You will notice throughout the nursery corridor there are many options for you to make a comment – please feel free to do this.

We also ask for your opinion by issuing 1 formal audit each term.  This session (2018-2019) we plan to audit these four areas:

• Term 1: Nursery Induction
• Term 2: Interactive Learning Diaries
• Term 3: Next steps and achievements
• Term 4: General Nursery experience

We use the results of these audits to plan for future nursery development.  We combine these results with local and national guidance to ensure that Cults Nursery is the best it can be!