sciences – Page 19 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Growing Families

Lots of children and their families have been taking part in the growing project organised by Eileen, our Family Learning Co-ordinator. They have enjoyed the story of “Oliver’s Vegetables”, made placemats, planted cress and made scarecrows with wooden spoons. Now some of the children have gone home with bags to grow carrots and onions which should be interesting and before you know it, we will have raised beds in the Nursery garden to grow our own vegetables. We look forward to the Sunshine Room and the Rainbow Room having a raised bed each. I wonder which room will grow the most vegetables?
Thanks Eileen for your great ideas and organisation as always. We look forward to the next stage of our growing project.

Marie Curie Mini Pots of Care

Along with many schools and nurseries throughout the country, the children celebrated “Mini Pots of Care Day” last week by decorating pot wrappers for the daffodils they had nurtured over the winter and then taking their pots home to someone they care about. As well as being a fantastic opportunity to contrbute to society, this project provided great opportunities to learn about how plants grow.
As a result of the generous sponsorship of families and friends, we are delighted to be able to send a grand sum of £234.70 to Marie Curie Cancer Care. We would like to say a huge thank you to those of you who helped us raise this excellent total. We feel sure that our donation will be put to good use.

How Many Ways Can We Use Snow?

What fun we had when the snow arrived yesterday. The children seemed to find so many different ways to enjoy it and many spent nearly the whole session out in the Nursery garden.
They tried to build snow mummies, snow babies and snow dogs but they discovered that the snow was a bit too soft. Some lay down to make snow angels and others were very inventive and used the tyres to make a snow bin where they stored “special snow for special things”. A bucket with a little water in the bottom provided a useful experiment as they tried to work out what was happening when they put snow in and it changed appearance. One group spent ages in a taxi, talking about getting the heating on and hoping that they would get to Carlisle safely as the weather was bad for driving. There were so many wonderful ideas happening everywhere.
It was hard to capture good photos because the children didn’t stay still for long in their excitement but hopefully these will capture some of the moments of our lovely snowy day.

Rain, Rain, Come Back Another Day

Water play was available on a large scale at the end of last term. As the rain seemed to have forgotten to stop, a huge puddle kept growing and growing in our garden. Unlike most adults, of course, the children simply found this very exciting and were keen to play in it.
As you can see from the photos, a lot of learning can happen with a few ducks, some boats, guttering and water wheels. We even managed to make rainbow bubbles with a little touch of washing up liquid. The children certainly showed themselves to be successful learners and effective contributors as they worked together to solve lots of problems and talk about their findings. We hope that the rain does come back another day as it provided such a fun learning experience.

Bye Bye Butterflies

After great anticipation, all our butterflies finally emerged from their cocoons, much to the delight of the children and some parents who have been following their progress. On Monday we were able to release them in the Nursery garden. After a little hesitation, each one flew off to their new life to the happy cheers and waves of the children and staff.

We hope that these photos capture the moment as it was certainly a very exciting and happy one for everyone.

Our Cocoons Have Been Made

The exciting news at the end of last week was that our caterpillars decided that it was time to make their cocoons. We watched carefully as one by one they made their way to the top of the tub, curled up and formed their own little cocoons. They are now safe and sound in the net, with some juicy pieces of orange waiting for them when they emerge. Hopefully, our beautiful butterflies should arrive soon.

Caterpillar “Babies”

No doubt most of you will know about the latest additions to Nursery – our five little caterpillars which arrived in a cardboard box last week. Having recently learned about the life cycle of a caterpillar, the children were very excited to get the opportunity to look after their own.

caterpillar large group — Everyone was very interested in our new arrivals.

Miss Kerr read the instructions so that we would know how to look after them properly. As Finlay said, “They need perfect conditions”. When we came back to Nursery today, they had already grown so hopefully they are healthy and happy in Nursery.

Lots of the children have already shown their families our new “babies” so everyone is looking forward to seeing how they develop in the next week or two. Please feel free to ask the children to show you them if you want to follow their progress.

caterpillar close — Keeping a close eye on our new additions.

Ducklings

As promised, Murray’s Mum had more exciting visitors for us after the previous week’s surprise appearance of their lamb. This time it was six gorgeous ducklings that came to say hello one afternoon. They were only a week old but already growing quickly. We had some interesting suggestions of what colour they might be before we saw them but we soon found out that there was a black one and five which looked “browny green” as the children described them. We had a look at the duckling’s webbed feet and learned that they don’t have any teeth but no-one risked their fingers in their beaks, just in case.

Thank you to Murray and his Mum for letting us have a look at their little ducklings. As you can see from the photos, we all thought that they were super visitors.

Spring is Here

What a lovely surprise the afternoon children had last week when Murray brought his lamb in to visit us. Everyone was very excited to meet a lamb close up and enjoyed learning how to feed it from a bottle. Thank you very much to Murray and his family. We are looking forward to meeting the next surprise visitors!

Click on the photos to make them bigger.

Mini Pots of Care Day

Along with many schools and nurseries throughout the country, the children celebrated “Mini Pots of Care Day” on Wednesday by decorating pot wrappers for the daffodils they had nurtured over the winter and then taking their pots home to someone they care about.

We were also delighted to be able to present a large cheque to Sheena from Marie Curie Cancer Care, thanks to the generous donations from families and friends. Even after we had written our large presentation cheque, more donations came in and the children have currently raised an amazing £549.35. Thanks to Sheena and Henry the bear for explaining how our money will be used and a huge thank you to all those who contributed to our wonderful total.

As you can see from the photos, we all looked after our daffodils very well. We hope they survived their journey home in the windy weather.