Successful Learners – Page 14 – Hecklegirth Nursery

Healthy And Tasty

When Yvonne and Louise, from the Health Improvement Team, visited us last month for an informal taster and information session, they left some healthy recipes for us to try so this little group decided to experiment with the flapjack recipe.
Careful counting and measuring help to develop the children’s skills in Numeracy and Mathematics while their discussions, observation and use of the oven develop learning in Sciences and Technologies. The end result of some fun learning was a delicious smell which was matched by a gorgeous tasting session. Thank you to Yvonne and Louise for a super healthy recipe. This is one that we may use again.

STEM Visitors

The Rainbow Room children were recently lucky to enjoy the fun science activities that those in the Raindrop Room had experienced. Miss Ash, a Science teacher at Annan Academy, brought her STEM Ambassadors to support our children to engage in a range of experiments. It was unfortunate that so many missed this opportunity, due to illness, but those who participated had a fun learning experience and were encouraged to understand that they too can be scientists.
We would like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to Miss Ash and her STEM Ambassadors for their time and patience. We hope that we can continue to enjoy shared experiences in the future to inspire our children to see science a possible future career.

Word Of The week

The Rainbow Room will have ‘performance’ as their “Word of the Week” while the Raindrop Room is having ‘Christmas’.

Annan Academy Visit

After experimenting with full sized musical instruments recently in the Rainbow Room, where lots of little bands were formed, the music department at Annan Academy kindly invited small groups to visit their music room to learn more about a range of different instruments. As you can see, this was a great experience and we would like to thank Mr. Brand and his pupils very much for their patience and time on our visits. We know that some of the children have now put trumpets and drums on their Santa list so they may well be experts by the time they reach Annan Academy as pupils.

Reading Is Fun Together

Children, parents and staff gathered together last week to celebrate the official launch of Hecklegirth Nursery Library. The launch promotes ‘Reading is Fun Together’. The children who joined us, with their families, received a Teddy Bear each to take home, to help and encourage reading together. The Nursery Library is stocked with over 200 books, all donated by Nursery and School families.
This is the culmination of a series of events to promote literacy both in the home and at Nursery. Parents and staff worked together to create five key ‘Words Together’ messages with the aim of raising awareness of good communication skills to support their child’s development in literacy.
Mrs. Eileen Johnstone, Lifelong Learning Co-ordinator, and Mrs. Jen Carruthers, Nursery Nurse, have worked with families to model and promote the communication skills in weekly story and rhyme activity sessions.
Lots of lucky little bears headed home last week to enjoy listening to stories shared with our children. If you would like to be part of our library project and take home a reading buddy to care for, the library will be in the Rainbow Room at 9.00 on Wednesday mornings and in the corridor on a Thursday. Lots of little bears are waiting to visit your homes. Apologies that we forgot to draw the prize winner of the nursery rhyme competition but, as you can see, Santa helped us out with that later in the day and the prizewinner received her prize.

Word Of The Week

‘Nativity’ is “Word of the Week” for the Raindrop Room this week while the Rainbow Room children are having ‘church’ as their focus.

Learning With Chocolate

The children in the Rainbow Room have been making chocolate shapes to sell as a little enterprise project. Initially a group of children went shopping to buy the ingredients, helping them to understand the purpose of money. Back at Nursery, discussions about what would happen when we put chocolate in the microwave then the fridge provided the opportunity to develop the children’s science learning and they also used numeracy skills to count the squares of chocolate when preparing their chocolate shapes. Of course there was also the opportunity for a little tasting as some of the children enjoyed the age old tradition of “cleaning” the bowl at the end.
We can certainly recommend the chocolate shapes to anyone who has a little money to spare – at 50p a bag we think that they are a tasty buy so watch out for the children’s basket of shapes in Nursery.

Engineers Of The Future

What can we build using sugar cubes? The children have been getting their thinking caps on to see what they can create using a box of sugar cubes. They faced a few tricky challenges when their towers fell down after they reached a certain height, when they tried to work out how to make a roof for their ice house and when they ran out of cubes while planning a huge construction. These are the engineers of the future beginning to problem solve and show creativity in their work when faced with a challenge. Great work children!

The Nativity

As Christmas approaches, we have been developing the children’s awareness of the Christmas story and the role play area in the Rainbow Room has been transformed into a nativity scene. Through play they are showing an understanding of the story and many children are keen to take on different roles.

Reading Is Fun Together

We would like to remind you about the official opening of our library on Thursday 5th December between 9.00 and 9.45.
We are starting a “Reading Is Fun Together” project to go along with our library. Thanks to a kind donation from the Hecklegirth Fundraisers, we have beautiful teddies which need temporary homes (teddies will be returned to Nursery at the end of the year). These teddies need to be read to every day, and we hope your child will enjoy having a teddy/buddy to listen to stories with. The mince pies are bought and our little teddies are waiting to make friends with your child. We look forward to seeing you on Thursday morning for the official opening of our project.