health and wellbeing – Page 95 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Christmas Chocolate

With the school Christmas Fayre on Thursday of this week, we have been making chocolate Christmas shapes to sell on our stall. Predicting what would happen when we put chocolate in the microwave then the fridge produced some thoughtful conversations. We also used numeracy skills to count the squares of chocolate and the number of moulds we had to fill, as well as reading the dial to set the microwave so there was a lot of learning going on as we prepared our chocolate shapes.
We hope that lots of Nursery children and their families will be able to come to the Christmas Fayre on Thursday (6.00 – 8.00). We can recommend the chocolate shapes to anyone who has a little money to spend – they were certainly made with lots of tender loving care.

Pirates of the Rainbow Room

A group of pirates has been very busy in the Rainbow Room this week. An initial interest in drawing treasure maps resulted in us hunting out some pirate outfits and having our own treasure hunt in the Nursery garden. The children had great fun as they tried to follow the map and were very excited when they found the treasure chest which, of course, was marked with an “X”. They then decided for themselves to work in teams to hide the treasure chest and see if the other team of pirates could find it. Treasure maps also started to appear on the Promethean board as well as paper and there was lots of discussion about what kind of treasure we might find.
The Nursery pirates made a visit to Primary 3 to see what they had been learning about pirates. Mrs. Mahon was delighted to get some special visitors and sent them back with some pirate goodies – you can see the number game in one of our photos. She asked if the children could make some treasure for Primary 3’s treasure chest so they set to their task in the craft area and today they duly delivered their treasure to Primary 3.
Well done you pirates of the Rainbow Room – you have certainly shown yourselves to be successful learners and effective contributors with all your fantastic ideas.

Pirates use technology for their map making.

Primary 3 had some brilliant pirate things.

Thanks for the pirate number game Mrs. Mahon.

Safety Stars

Congratulations to this week’s Star Award winners who offered good ideas about how to stay safe when we were talking about Bonfire Night. Well done both of you, you deserved those certificates for helping everyone think about safety near a bonfire and fireworks.

Celebration Statue

On Friday we were invited to join P1-3 for the unveiling of a statue in our school outdoor learning area. A former pupil, who is now a parent, is celebrating his 50th birthday in the same year as Hecklegirth School and has created an impressive statue to recognise the event. Unfortunately the weather was not kind on the day, as you can see from the photos, but it was lovely to be part of this landmark event. We are looking forward to a closer look at this interesting piece of art when we make visits to our outdoor classroom in the future.

Why Has A Digger Come To Nursery?

A digger and trailer arrived unexpectedly at Nursery today which caused quite a bit of excitement for those busy in the garden. It was even more exciting when we realised that Robbie’s Dad had come with it and that he was bringing us lots of bark to top up our garden.
Suddenly our day changed and we all had to get our spades and wheelbarrows into action to transport the huge pile of bark into the digging area of the Nursery garden. What fantastic teamwork and perseverance the children showed, working so well together as they shovelled it into wheelbarrows, took them up the ramp into the garden and raked the bark flat. They were all taking turns and helping each other if the wheelbarrow was a bit tricky to manage – getting it up that ramp is not as easy as you would think. Very well done to the gardening team – we couldn’t have managed without you. We hope that everyone appreciates your hard work.

Hallowe’en Fun

After all our fun with pumpkins, everyone was in the mood for our Hallowe’en parties and we certainly had lots of fun. We dooked for apples, caught marshmallows with our teeth, played lots of games and enjoyed party food together. Thanks to everyone for sending the children in their fantastic outfits which helped them to feel part of the fun. We hope you can get a flavour of the parties from our photos. Click on each photo to make it bigger.
To make a comment please click on “… Comments” under our title “Hallowe’en Fun” above.

Cooking Crumble

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.

Harvest Celebrations

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.

Harvest Thank You

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.

Family Learning

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.