Over the past few weeks, the children have been practising their Christmas songs ready for some performances.  The favourite of both the morning and afternoon children is S-A-N-T-A, perhaps they will treat you to a rendition at home!  Please join us this week for our sing-a-long, 10.45 for the morning children and 1.15 for the afternoon.  We look forward to seeing you all there.

Last week the morning children celebrated the beginning of Polish Christmas by receiving a little chocolate in their shoe.  In Poland on 6th December, the children receive gifts of chocolates and small toys in their shoes.  We carried this tradition on with Laura this year.  The afternoon children will this week be celebrating Swedish Christmas, thanks to Honor and her family.  This celebration is known as St Lucia and is celebrated on December 13th.  St Lucia is the Patron Saint of Light and she guides the people on the darkest day.  To celebrate this we will sing carols and have a procession around the school.

On the last week of term we will be having our Christmas parties and we also have arranged a special visit from Scott Lovatt, the magician.

Well December is fast approaching and we have been very busy in the nursery.  We have been getting prepared by making arts and crafts for the Christmas Coffee Morning in the Town Hall on Saturday 30th November.

The children have been enjoying taking part in science activities during group time.  This morning they discovered magic messages from Mrs Galloway!  Each child had a blank piece of paper and had to paint it to see what they could find.  They were amazed with the results.  Before their eyes, messages appeared on the paper.  One message told them to go to the water tray to take part in another experiment. They have also been finding out magnets and how they work.

Next week we are hoping for a special visit from the Fire Brigade.  Fingers crossed they don’t get called out!

We have been very busy the last couple of weeks in the nursery.  The Polar Bears came to visit us and we had a spooky Halloween party.

The Polars Bears visited us from the MacRobert Centre in Stirling. They brought a fantastic show to the nursery which the children really enjoyed.  The children got to dance and play with the Polar Bears as they took a journey up a mountain, across a river and over a wobbly bridge.  A big thank to the Polar Bears for coming to see us.

Our Halloween party was a great success with some fantastic costumes.  There were lots of different games and activities for the children to take part in all around the nursery.  Some children were very brave and put their hands into the witches cauldron to see what they could find.  The cauldron was filled with slimey jelly and lots of creepy critters!  The children made their own magic poitions, dooked for apples and sung their hearts out.

Next week is Children in Need, so remember to wear your pyjamas next Friday (15th)!

What a busy time we have had in nursery this term.  Lots of fun and exciting things have been happening and there is more to come.  After the break we will be finding out all about wheels.  There are lots of questions that need to be answered.

The Orange Group went to the coffee morning this week, this was the first time they had been.  All the children had a great time and were very well behaved.  On the way back to school we made a stop off to collect some apples.  The children got to pick them from the tree and we have been enjoying them for snack this week.

A wee reminder that we are on holiday next week and we welcome you back on Monday 21st October.  Have a lovely October break.

The nursery has all been moved around and the children are enjoying the different areas which have been added to the main room.  The house corner has been a firm favourite with all and it is nice to see the children playing together to tell a story.

A garage has been opened in the nursery since the children had taken an interest in blowing up tyres and fixing the bikes outside.   They now have spanners, nuts, bolts and lots of other instruments to help them take apart and mend the bikes with some supervison.

The children have really enjoyed going to the Community Wing in the school to take part in ring games and songs.  They have been playing games with the parachute which requires a great deal of team work and super listening from everyone.  The games have allowed the children to practice listening carefully for colours and numbers, which they have all been doing very well.

A little reminder that the October break begins on Friday 11th October and we return to school on Monday 21st October.

 We have had such a busy week in nursery, with lots of special visitors with exciting things to share with us.

 Both the morning and afternoon classes were treated to singing and dancing from the Pallywags and Johnny and his Magic Guitar.  A big thank you to Nicolls and Dimes Stage School in Alloa for providing some great entertainment.  The children had a lovely time singing some new songs, playing lots of instruments and dancing with their new friends, the Pallywags.  There are lots of pictures of the fun in the nursery foyer for everyone to look at.

First blog of the new term and we’d like to welcome everyone back.  This is going to be a very busy term and we have lots of exciting things planned.

After chatting to the children, they decided that our topic for this term would be Dinosaurs.  They have come up with some super ideas of what they would like to know and find out.  In the sand tray this week we have been excavating dinosaur fossils using expert equipment.  The children have enjoyed trying to find the dinosaurs and work out what type they are.  In the coming weeks we will be taking part in lots of other exciting activities.

With the lovely weather we have been having the children have spent a lot of time outside.  They have been practising riding bikes, balancing, sharing and taking turns.  Our fruit and vegetable patch has also been a great success, the children have been harvesting strawberries, potatoes, green beans and carrots.  I think they definitely enjoyed eating the strawberries!

This week the Blue Group walked beautifully to the coffee morning in the church hall.  They all had a super morning and enjoyed their juice and cake.  Thank you to the ladies that helped us walk up.  Next week another group will be going and any help is greatly appreciated.

We have some visitors to the nursery next week from Nicolls and Dimes Stage school.  We will keep you posted on how much fun we have.

What a busy few weeks it has been. The children are showing interests in so many things. Firstly we looked at farms and animals, concentrating on the names of baby animals. We played a matching mum to baby game and used a lovely selection of books in the story corner to reinforce the language.  We had some great results at the play dough, cutting animal shapes and in the sand they have enjoyed playing with animals and tractors and making tyre tracks. The children have shown a huge interest in flowers and planting. We have had some super daffodil paintings from still life. All groups have been planting indoors and outdoors. We are now growing carrots, peas, beans, potatoes, onions, cress and sunflowers. We are now clearing our large tubs and topping up with compost. We are going to plant them up on our Rights and Respect Day at the end of May.

We tried an experiment with water and food colouring using carnations and celery. There were some interesting results. The red groups flowers turned red and the celery leaves turned brown. This caused some great conversations about colour mixing – red and green making brown. This interest has continued at the painting and gloop where the children are now mixing their own colours. We have had flowerpots and garden tools in the sand and watering cans and plant pots with holes in the water tray. They are also talking about blossom and bluebells. We now  have a very popular garden centre as our role play area. The children are using real coins, arranging and wrapping flowers, counting out money and plant pots etc, using technology – tills, strimmer, hedge trimmer, and lawn mower all battery operated! They are writing shopping lists and receipts, and learning about the roles people play. Will try and upload some photos. They have a super activity at the maths area matching two flowers the same and also putting them into order of size smallest to largest or largest to smallest.  There has also been a huge interest in frogs and tadpoles. We have enjoyed the tadpole eco-sack at group time and loved looking at real tadpoles that Rory brought in. They came from a friend’s pond and have now been returned. The children were mesmerised by them so thank you Rory. They have a good grasp now of the lifecycle of a frog and this is being reinforced at our jigsaw table with our life cycle and pond puzzles.

The children’s interest we are about to follow is Mini-beasts especially now we are out in the garden most days. There has already been a lot of worm hunting and some interest in dressing up in the ladybird and bee costumes. We will soon be looking at the butterfly lifecycle, as we will be ordering our caterpillars. We will watch them grow and then release them into our garden.

 As you can see there is so much happening along with transition visits to school. Nursery is so much fun and all children are becoming successful learners, effective contributors, responsible citizens and confident individuals.

Thank you to all those who have already supported Comic Relief by buying a red nose. How fab that this year they were dinosaurs following on from our fantastic topic 😉 The children are getting very excited at being dressed as a superhero on Friday!!! Some have already been practising. We are looking forward to seeing some interesting outfits (outnumbered by Spiderman!)

Sorry it’s been so long!!! It’s been a very busy couple of months and after our winter topic was put on hold because of the lack of winter weather! the childrens interest in dinosaurs took off like never before. It was amazing. The children were certainly enthusiastic about learning. We used a variety of storybooks (especially Harry & The Dinosaurs) and information books that the children spent a long time looking at and they were accessible all around the Nursery.

We had an excavation of dinosaur bones in sand stone and with lots of hard work, concentration and perseverance they managed to then assemble it into Triceratops.

We had an archaeological dig at the sand tray with hard hats, trowels, brushes, clipboard and a dinosaur dig information sheet to fill in for early literacy. We also had bones, sieves, dinosaurs and eggs. They certainly developed their language – meat eater, plant eater, herbivore, carnivore, palaeontologist, excavation, spiky, bony plates, extinct, etc. We managed to buy a fantastic excavation product from TTS.

At the water tray we had a dinosaur swamp for a sensory activity. This was hugely popular. If you can get hold of Gelli Baff in green that’s even better 😉

At the craft the children made gorgeous woolly mammoths from plastic milk cartons (Elmer style) with white pipe cleaners threaded through for tusks.

We had a collection of dinosaurs for grouping in the small imaginative area and at the maths table they were sorting by size and matching and also measured the length of bones and put them into order of size. They also played Dotty Dinosaurs (an Orchard Toy product) which concentrates on colour and shape recognition.

The children have also enjoyed a science experiment  to free dinosaurs that were stuck in a block of ice and worked out how they could get the ice to melt. We had  lots of interesting suggestions of how we could do this!

At the dough table they were having fun making play dough leaves for the dinosaur to eat, dinosaur eggs to go in the nest, and dinosaur bones and horns.

The children  produced some beautiful drawings and paintings of dinosaurs and they were on display throughout the Nursery. They also made dinosaur skeletons with art straws.

The children enjoyed making their own fossils by imprinting into dough and also made giant dinosaur footprints. A few families went to see the T-Rex and a Stegosaurus skeletons in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and it was  free to get in. They all had a fabulous time and Lily emailed photos to us so that we could print them off for the displays.

We used a trundle wheel to measure the size of a diplodocus outside by counting the clicks. Mrs Galloway chalked it out and the staff and children then went out to stand inside from one end to the other to see how many it would take to fill it. We also had a strip of masking tape on the corridor floor which was the width of a pteranodons wing. Boy I am glad they are extinct.

The children moved to music by stomping, moving fast, slow,etc. and they even had a volcano! for snack. The topic was endless and we sure had plenty of effective contributors and successful learners.