The presentations from the open evening can be found here:

Nursery open evening 2017

PEEP 2017

This afternoon nursery children visited Menstrie House where the residents had a visit from two Shetland ponies, Flicker and Wilson, from Therapy Ponies Scotland. Before the visit, the children came up with their own risk assessments: one for travelling to Menstrie House safely and one to keep ourselves safe when near the ponies. These risk assessments can be seen in the nursery floorbook.

The children had lots of fun petting the ponies and some had the opportunity to run in the garden with them. We look forward to our next visit to Menstrie House.

As this week is ‘Maths Week’ the children have been learning about the use of money. The children have been using money in their role play to buy different items.

At circle time we discussed what shops we go to and what types of things we can buy. We then played a shopping game and looked at coins and notes.

During the week the children will be selling the apples they have picked from the nursery garden. These will be 4 for £1.

We hope you will be able to join us for the nursery open evening on Thursday 14th September, 7-8pm. You will have the opportunity to meet the staff team and find out more information about e-journals, the nursery routines, the PEEP programme and the Wellcomm screening programme.

The children noticed that the plums on the tree in the garden were very red. We picked some to check that they were ripe.

The adults prepared the plums by washing them and removing the stones before we all tasted them.

The children also had the opportunity to make plum tarts with Miss Wright. We discussed good hygiene, how to prepare the plums, how to stay safe when using a knife and how to stay safe when using the oven. We took turns to prepare them. When they were ready, we let them cool and took them home to eat!

As you will know, we will no longer be using the hardback learning journals to record observations of children in the nursery. All observations will be recorded on individual online profiles (e-journals). Please follow the link below to find out more about these.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mkfyZIuSiXGL0wZru1rdjocsFXyny_LzFSVDp0rD9BU/mobilebasic

By 2020, funded early learning and childcare hours are set to double. Follow the link below to have your say.

http://socsi.in/Early-learning-and-childcare-1140-hrs-consultation_YKyK0

We hope you have all had a fantastic summer! We would like to take this opportunity to welcome our new families to Menstrie Nursery and we would also like to welcome back our pre-school children.

The blog will be updated regularly – please check to find out what the children have been learning and to find out important dates for each term.

The nursery groupings for this session are as follows:

Rainbow group – Miss Wright and Mrs Docherty

Sun group – Ms Russell

Cloud group – Mrs Stanners (M, T, W) and Miss Tasker (W, Th, F)

Moon group – Ms Williamson

Star group – Mrs Nimmo

If you have any questions, please speak to your child’s keyworker. Alternatively you can contact Miss McEwan (Acting Senior Early Years Worker) or Miss Wright (Nursery Teacher).

Unfortunately, Mrs Kelly and Mrs Moore will be leaving us at the end of this session. We would like to thank them for their hard work; they have been an asset to the team and will be missed by children and staff.

We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome Miss Tasker who will be joining us in August 2017. She will work alongside Mrs Stanners and the Cloud group.

Recently we have been learning about the different jobs people do. Our community police officer, PC Allen, came to talk to us about his job.

We learned:

• how to contact the Police.
• how the Police can help us.
• about some of the equipment the Police use.
• why there are different sirens on a Police car/van.

The nursery children were also able to ask PC Allen questions.