We would like to say a big thank you to St. Columba’s playgroup staff for facilitating a visit for the children who will leave them to come to us next year. The weather was kind to us for both visits so the children were able to enjoy playing outdoors with the current Nursery children, who looked after our visitors well. We always feel a little sad when we wave off our children to Primary 1 but it’s exciting to know that we have so many new children starting with us in August. Thank you, St. Columba’s for sharing your lovely children with us last week.
Category: 2010-2011
Getting excited about Primary 1
It’s amazing how quickly the term is disappearing and we are already at that point where Primary 1 teachers are visiting us in Nursery to get to know the children who will be in their class next year. It’s so exciting for everyone to meet their teacher and it helps to build the children’s confidence for the next big step in their lives. We are very lucky to have had visits from several teachers who have kindly taken the time to visit us at such a busy time and we look forward to more visits soon. We managed to take a snapshot of Miss Houston this week, meeting the pupils who will go to Elmvale Primary in August.
Miss Wilson’s speedy snails
When Miss Wilson spotted two very big snails in her garden she just knew Nursery would love to see them. Only a day earlier, a group of afternoon children had met Miss Wilson on a mission to find out which is the slowest creature in the world. They had been watching our caterpillars in Nursery and thought they moved very slowly so wanted to find out the answer to this very tricky question.
To help us in our investigation, Miss Wilson brought us the snails in a big tub with lots of leaves. We soon discovered that they were not as slow as we had thought because they kept climbing out of the tub, much to everyone’s amusement. Poor Miss Kerr and Miss Boyd had to keep catching them and putting them back in the tub before the super snails crawled along our drawing table and into our pen tubs. We thought they were so amazing that we took our snails to visit Primary 1 and 2 as well so they really did have a great adventure at Hecklegirth School.
Miss Wilson has now taken her beautiful and very speedy snails back to her garden: we thought it might be a bit tricky finding them on Monday if we left them for the week-end.
Hecklegirth’s Happy Hairdressers
Our much visited flower shop has now become a hairdresser’s salon and it’s a very busy little place. Miss Boyd and Mrs. Kirkpatrick have both had “the full works” this week and came out of the experience with wonderful hairstyles, crafted by our budding young stylists. Parents and family members are welcome to come in for a visit to join in the fun: just put your name on the “Come and Play” grid in the cloakroom, as always. We can guarantee you will leave “Hecklegirth Hairdresser’s” feeling like a million dollars as the children will continually tell you how fantastic you look.
Staying Safe
PC Leggat paid us a visit this week to talk about staying safe on the roads and “stranger danger”. Everyone already knew him from our visit to the police station so the children were very confident to talk about their ideas. We had a very interesting discussion about what a stranger is and how we know if someone is a stranger. The children demonstrated super thinking skills and most had good strategies of what to do if they got separated from their parents or a stranger approached them. Thank you, as always, to PC Leggat who has helped the children feel that police officers are friendly and helpful.
Pictures from home
Thank you to all those parents who worked with their children to make beautiful pictures as a home activity. It’s wonderful to see all the different ideas that can be used to transform a bare tree in to a Spring picture. The discussions that these pictures generated in Nursery are as valuable as the creative use of materials so thanks go to the children and their families for contributing to such a valuable learning activity. We hope you enjoy a selection of the pictures below.
Please click on a photo for a closer look at the detail that the children have put into these wonderful pictures.
Looking after ourselves
We all love visitors in Nursery and this week we had two visitors who talked to us about looking after ourselves. The school nurse and the oral health officer were very impressed with the children’s knowledge and we had great fun trying to clean a monkey’s teeth. It can be tricky getting in to the corners with that big brush but the monkey seemed quite pleased with our efforts.
Storytelling with Primary 5
The last day before our long Easter week-end brought a surprise visit to Primary 5 who had invited us to hear their fairy tales. It’s a long walk up the stairs to Primary 5 but it was well worth it as their stories were brilliant. Nursery children sat beautifully and showed what very good listeners they are and Primary 5 were wonderful story tellers. Huge thanks go to Miss Dennis and Primary 5 for their kind invitation. We had a great time.
What size is your egg?
We talked about Easter celebrations this week and got excited talking about our favourite Easter eggs. We all shared ideas to work out which Easter eggs were the smallest and the biggest in the magic bag. The children holding the eggs were nearly dizzy moving about to get our Easter egg line in the right order. In the end, everyone agreed that we had managed to get them in order from the smallest to the biggest. Good teamwork Nursery children!
