Welcome back to nursery to all our returning children and welcome to all our new children!

We are all enjoying being back at nursery and we have noticed a few changes. Miss Lamb has joined us to work with the blue group; Mrs Burden is working with the green group; Miss McNeil is working with the orange group; Mrs Lindsay and Ms Waldron are sharing the red  group; Mrs McIntosh is working with the yellow group; and Mrs Galloway is working with the purple group.  Mrs Budge, Mrs Urquhart and Mrs Ireland are working with children from all of the groups..

We have been particularly enjoying getting outside, when the weather has been nice and we have been learning to take care of our outside toys.  We have been thinking about how we can be responsible at nursery.  All of the groups have adopted a pet. We have enjoyed making beds and collars for our pets and some of them have even gone home for the weekend to have some more adventures.

Here are some photos of our first few weeks.

We have had an excellent we this week! All of our children loved our trips to Briarlands Farm. The weather was very kind to us and we all remembered our sun cream.  We bounced on giant pillows. We went on a tractor ride and saw lots of animals including some calves, which were only six days old.  We held rabbits and guinea pigs and we thought they were very furry and soft.  We climbed, jumped, ran and laughed our way through the day. We had so much fun that lots of people fell asleep on the bus on the way home!

In other news our oldest boys and girls found out, who their p1 teachers will be and we met one of them for the first time.  The nursery staff met some of the new boys and girls, who will be joining us in August.

We are looking forward to the holidays very much now but we still have lots to fit in, including our visit to the school lunch hall, our teddy bears picnic and our final sing song for our mums and dads!

The Scottish government is currently consulting on early learning provision and is seeking the views of parents of 3 and 4 year olds. Click on the link below to share your views. It should only take 3-4 minutes!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/childcaresurvey2015

We have had another busy week at Clackmannan Nursery.  The staff and children have been working very hard to improve our outdoor learning area.  We have built a construction area with lorries and diggers.  We have added musical instruments to enhance our stage area and we are in the process of creating a mud kitchen.

In preparation for our nursery trip to Briarlands Farm in a few weeks, we had a visit from some small animals this week. We really enjoyed meeting and patting them!

We are all very happy to be back at nursery for the new term.

Before the holidays all the boys and girls had the chance to choose what we would like to learn at nursery.  Lots of people wanted to learn about travel and transport so we chose this as our theme for the new term.

So far we have enjoyed drawing and painting lots of vehicles and we have been finding out how they use their wheels to move.

The boys and girls, who will be going to school after the summer holidays have been visiting the primary one classes at school. They have enjoyed playing in the school playground and learning some French in the classrooms.

We have finished our Under the Sea theme over the last couple of weeks. We have enjoyed designing treasure maps and using them to find hidden treasure. We have had lots of pirate games going on. We have had opportunities to build our own boats and to find out if they could float or if they would sink! We came up with lots of good ideas for better boat designs.

We have also been noticing signs of spring around the nursery and around the town.  We will be carrying on with this over the next week and will be out and about exploring our area.  What sign of spring do you think we will spot?

We have also planned to decorate and to roll our own Easter Eggs next week so we will be looking for a good hill nearby for rolling!

Now the weather has been getting warmer and drier we will have been getting lots more chances to get outdoors. We have been enjoying this very much.

Here are some photos of our learning adventures.

Among many other things in the nursery this week we have been doing “something funny for money,” to raise money for comic relief.

We have been enjoying dressing up in lots of silly hats, glasses and wigs. We have been thinking of lots of words to describe how we look and we have done lots of laughing!

We have also been enjoying helping the nursery teachers to prepare our snack.  We have been learning about washing our hands and our fruits as well as how to store our snack to make sure it will be safe to eat.

Here are some photos of our adventures!

We are still very busy with lots of learning to do with ‘Under the Sea’ at nursery at the moment. We have learned about lots of different fishes and we have made many of them at the art table.

We now have a pirate ship in our nursery and we are enjoying dressing up and acting out pirate stories. We are trying to make sure our pirates are not too fierce!

We have been improving our fine motor skills by writing in sand, using tweezers to add pebbles to our ocean scenes, and by adding lots of decorations to our playdough models.  We have even made boats out of our snacks.  We also used our pebbles to practise counting.

We have been learning to hold our pencils and pens using ‘froggy fingers’ and have been working hard on drawing lots of pictures and on adding lots of details to our pictures. Some people are even writing their names and some other letters.

We have been working very hard to learn about rhyming words and we really enjoyed reading ‘Tiddler’ by Julia Donaldson. We listened very carefully for rhyming words in the story and managed to hear lots of them. We are becoming experts at making lists of rhyming words and at matching rhyming words too.

This week we have the book fair in the nursery so we are looking forward to choosing some books to take home.

Our pre-school children started visiting our p1 classes this week. They will be visiting every week for the next few weeks. This week they joined in with some listening and talking activities and had a chance to play in the playground. It seems a good time was had by all.

Here are some photographs or our recent learning adventures!

We have had another busy week in nursery! We have started our Under the Sea topic and we are enjoying lots of new activities. We have been reading ‘The Light House Keeper’s Lunch and we have been acting out and retelling the story. Lots of boys and girls have enjoyed this!

Miss Waldron very kindly visited the beach for us and brought us back lots of beautiful shells and other things.  We have been very interested in these and have examined them very closely. We have even been creating our own art with them.

We have been continuing our work in our listening and sounds groups. We are becoming experts at hearing the syllables in words and we are working very hard on noticing rhyming words in stories and poems.  We have been discovering lots of words beginning with ‘s’ in our feely bag and are trying to notice ‘s’ words around the nursery.

Here are some pictures of us hard at work!

As you can see from our photographs we have been very busy at nursery over the last couple of weeks.  Our main focus has been Scottish poems and Scotland.  We have been using our pencil skills to make tartan. We have learned that thistles are the flower of Scotland. We have even had the chance to taste some haggis, with mixed results!

In Literacy we have been working on rhyming words. We have read and learned lots of Scottish poems and have listened for the rhyming words in the poems. We are getting better and better at finding rhyming words.

Next week we will be starting our new theme ‘Under the Sea.’  You can already see our nursery being transformed into the ocean and over the next few weeks we will be learning lots about this environment.

It has been a busy first week back in the nursery.  We have enjoyed sharing our stories of Christmas with our friends. We have all been working hard to get back into our nursery routine.  We have been remembering the listening and talking rules we had learned before the holidays and have been doing a great job at that.

During January we will be focussing on rules and routines as well as Scottish songs and rhymes.  You will be able to see our main learning outcomes on our notice board at the start of next week. At the end of the month we will be celebrating Burns Night and we may even try some traditional food at snack time.