We hope that everyone is enjoying their October holiday. Before you know it, we will be back in Nursery and looking forward to our Hallowe’en parties. As you can see, one or two of the children were getting in the mood on the last day of term as we set up our Hallowe’en houses, ready for our witches to brew up their potions. Enjoy the rest of your holiday boys and girls. We will see you all soon.
The children certainly seemed to have enjoyed learning their harvest songs. Teigan’s Mum left us a lovely comment about her singing at home:
“teigan has been singing the song she learned from the harvest festival to me at home as I was unable to make it due to work which made me laugh, she seems to be enjoying nursery very much.”
Well done Teigan for giving your Mum her own performance.
This week we have been talking about the difference between numbers, letters and pictures. To help us in our learning we went on a hunt around school to see if we could find examples and some children took photos as evidence. As well as the numbers, letter and pictures which had been laid in a trail, there were lots of other examples on our journey. We found numbers on P3’s brilliant rocket that was outside their classroom and letters on the mat at the school entrance. There were numbers on lunch boxes and display boards provided lots of letters and numbers, sometimes together, for example, “P7”. Hopefully, the children are now more aware of numbers and letters in their environment and will start to spot them when out and about with their families.
As we have been learning about Harvest and what happens in Autumn, some of the children used apples to make a crumble. It’s amazing how much learning can be developed from a simple cooking activity: the importance of hygiene and safety in the kitchen, fine motor control, counting and chopping skills, using the technology of a microwave and the effect of heat on the apples. Hopefully, you can see from these photos that the children are demonstrating some impressive skills. Most important of all, they had fun as they were learning.
Thank you to Ava, Carmen and Tom’s Mums for their comments on our Harvest celebration.
“Thank you to all the girls and boys for a lovely morning celebrating Harvest, I really enjoyed it. Ava has loved learning the 2 songs and has been singing them a lot at home too. I can see her confidence has grown since starting nursery, which is great, I’m really pleased!”
“Carmen chose pasta to bring into the school for Harvest Day. She said to me ” Do I have to cook the pasta for the people who don’t have a lot of food.” I’m a bit wee for that I won’t reach the cooker.” That made me smile!!”
“It was lovely to come into nursery and hear the children sing and see them all looking so happy and involved.”
The children and staff enjoyed our special celebration too and we all really appreciated how many of our families took the time to join us.
It was lovely to hear from one of our families from last year and great to get some news about Ollie:
“Hi. Just a wee update to let all the teachers know that ollie is really enjoying st Columbas and still talks about his friends and teachers at nursery. He attends tennis,swimming and football so catches up a lot with some of the boys and girls who were in his class. We hope that you have managed to get back over to the allotment and even picked some potatoes that you planted.
Exciting times ahead in our house as ollie is preparing to become a big brother in February. Happy October holidays. Love the hamilton’s. x”
We did visit the allotment on the last day of the school year and have recently been talking about going a walk there to see what’s happening now that it’s Autumn. Congratulations to Ollie on becoming a big brother – we are sure that he will do a super job in that role. It’s great that he still sees his Nursery friends and that he’s enjoying school. Thanks for keeping in touch. It would be lovely to hear how other former pupils are getting to on. I wonder if any of you ever look on our blog?
Thank you to all those children and their families who kindly donated to the collection for our Harvest celebration. Some of the children are shown below with their donations. We feel sure that all the food will be much appreciated by those involved with Kate’s Kitchen. Many thanks to Rev. McGougan for delivering our donations and for joining us in Nursery for a Harvest celebration.
We also really appreciated your fantastic support on Monday when you provided a wonderful audience for the children. It was a lovely opportunity for us all to gather together to celebrate Harvest and we hope that you enjoyed the children’s performance as much as they seemed to. One of our aims is to develop ‘confident individuals’ and many of our children showed themselves to be exactly that in their performance. Well done boys and girls!
Click on the photos to make them bigger.
Eileen, our Family Learning Co-ordinator, linked our recent family activity to our Harvest celebration and Carmen, Tom and Sophie’s Mums have all commented on our photos.
“Carmen and I really enjoyed this session. She got to learn all about food and were it comes from. I got to cut out the pictures and Carmen stuck them down. Thank you Eileen xx”
“It was lovely to see my mummy here.”
“It was lovely coming to family day, so nice to see Sophie in her school environment!”
We have all enjoyed hearing about the wide range of things that the children have chosen to say ‘thank you’ for on their Harvest baskets. You may recognise some of these from our Harvest celebration but we thought that they were lovely to share.
Darcy U.: thank you for my friends and sweeties and elephants
Teigan: thank you to my Mummy for my brother Logan
Mikey: thank you for toast
Jayden: thank you for my friends
Zachary: thank you for my racing cars and my Daddy and my police car
Freya: thank you to my Mummy for coming to Nursery to help me make my Harvest basket
Sophie D.: thank you for my lovely clothes and my family and for having a great friend Amy-Leigh
Darcey G.: thank you for my new shoes
Jakub: thank you for my family
Dan: thank you for all the food and my puppy from Fraser
Ava W.: thank you for tomatoes, bananas, my family and my friends
Sophie L.: thank you for pasta and holidays, for my family and friends and green apples.
We are delighted that many of our families took part in our first Family Learning activity of the year. Here you can see lots of children with their parents busy making harvest baskets and talking about where different foods come from. Thank you so much to Eileen, our Family Learning Co-ordinator, for organising this activity and to all our parents who took the time to join in.
As we have been learning about Autumn we decided to go out and about in the school grounds to look for some Autumn leaves. The Rainbow Room went on a leaf search to the outdoor learning area and the Sunshine Room decided to go to the school field as they could see so many leaves from their window. As you can see, everyone was very enthusiastic to collect as many leaves as they could and we are now going to use them in the art and craft area.
