sciences – Page 16 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Sophie’s Sunflower

Another sunflower from last year has grown successfully. Sophie’s Mum sent us a photo in her garden with a message.
“Sophie wanted to show nursery her sunflower, it has grow up to her chin and when we got home from Spain it had flowered too! We are very pleased its grown as we aren’t very good at gardening usually! Missing you all but enjoying primary 1.”

Well done Sophie! That’s a super sunflower. We are glad to hear that you are enjoying Primary 1.

Super Sunflower

Last term the children planted sunflower seeds in Nursery and took them home so that they could care for them. Some children brought them back in to show us once they had started to sprout and they seemed to be doing a super job of looking after their little plants. Mollie was telling us today that her sunflower had grown lots over the summer and her Mum has sent us a photo to share with everyone. Well done Mollie! You have looked after your sunflower really well. I wonder if anyone else has a photo of their sunflower?

Bye Bye Butterflies

After weeks of watching the progress of our caterpillars who slowly grew and formed their cocoons, we finally saw our beautiful butterflies emerging in their net last week. After a few days of feeding them on sugary water and slices of oranges, it seemed that they were ready to be released and we could think of no better place to set them free than in our outdoor classroom among the trees and flowers.
They seemed to be a little nervous of leaving their safe little home and Miss Kerr had to give them a helping hand to settle on the flowers which gave everyone a chance to have a close look at our little butterflies before they slowly flew off.
Click then click again for a bigger photo.

We’re Going On A Minibeast Hunt

The children have become very engaged in their learning about minibeasts over the last few weeks and have become engrossed in searching for them in the Nursery garden. As you can see, they have had the magnifying glasses and bug tubs in action and they worked well together as good detectives. The children quickly learned that underneath the alphabet stepping stones was one of the favourite homes of all sorts of minibeasts.

A Duckling Hatches In Nursery

There was great excitement in Nursery yesterday as the children were able to see the little duckling that had hatched in our incubator at the week-end. Unfortunately our photos are not very clear but hopefully most children were able to see the duckling before it went to Simon’s home to be looked after. As well as more ducklings, we hope that we may have some chicks soon. I wonder when they will arrive? Remember to keep an eye on the incubator in the Rainbow cloakroom.

Sunflower Planting

To tie in with our Family Learning growing project and work based on our learning about Vincent Van Gogh, the children have been planting sunflowers as well as painting them. Everyone should now have a little pot with their sunflower seed at home and the children should be able to tell their families what they need to do to look after it. Hopefully, they will be able to bring their plants or a photo back to Nursery later in the term to show us how well they are growing.
In the meantime here are some photos and comments from the planting activity.

Ava T: you put a seed in and some compost inside.
Jade: we were planting sunflowers. We give them sunshine and water and I’m caring for mine.
Teigan: we made our own flowers and gave them water.
Conan: it was Vincent Van Gogh who did the sunflowers.
Suzie: you put soil in then you put the seed in then you water it then you take it home.
Josie: when you make plants you need water and seeds.
Lexi: we were making sunflowers. You put soil in then plant a seed. Water makes them grow.
Logan: we were planting flowers. You need sun and water to make them grow.

Rain, Rain, Stay In Nursery

Which child doesn’t enjoy the opportunity to jump in a puddle? Well, we certainly had a big enough puddle for lots of jumping this week in Nursery when our garden area became waterlogged. As well as a mini pond in our mud kitchen, we had water stretched from one end of the pathway to another. It certainly brought home to children that winter weather is not all about Jack Frost and snow.
We had ducks and boats out which produced some valuable discussions about floating and sinking as well as lots of pouring and measuring to develop numeracy skills. The children worked so well together and enjoyed investigating their ideas in a real context. Great fun was had, for example, experimenting to see if a boat would sink if they filled it with water.
It may have been a little inconvenient for adults to use a different entrance to Nursery but the children took full advantage of conditions that were very exciting for them.

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.

Hecklegirth Harvest

Last week we lifted the last of our vegetables from the raised beds in the garden. This was the result of a super Family Learning project we did last term. Even although some of the children were not involved at the start of this project, they were still very enthusiastic to see which vegetables they could find in the beds. They worked hard to lift potatoes, courgettes, carrots, onions and beetroot and little groups showed great confidence to take their wheelbarrows to show all the older children in school. Mrs. Alexander was also impressed with their harvest when she met them on their travels round the school.
Well done children for all your hard work and thank you to Eileen, our Family Learning Co-ordinator, for her hard work. Those new to Nursery will be hearing about some of Eileen’s activities later this term and we hope that lots of you will join in with your children.