CP NEWS – September Edition (2025)

Children are leading their learning at Colquhoun Park EYC 

A vote was cast and animals won. We are now 3 weeks into learning all about the animal kingdom. Here’s a snapshot of what we have been up to.

 

How to feed the birds

Animals that live on a farm   

 

 

 

Natural Habitats

 

Animals that no longer live

 

 

 

If you would like to see more please take a look at our learning walls in the playroom where you can find and follow our whole journey!!

Mini Explorers

Our introduction programme to Mini Explorers kicked off. Children had the opportunity to take part in a variety of different experiences over a 2 week period such as;

Risky business – children learn to identify and manage risk.

Den building – working together children collect resources to build dens.

Bug hunt – children use visual prompts to find bugs in and around our grounds

Clay modelling  – children made bugs and insects out of clay

The Animal man came to visit centre. All children were invited in to take part in this show. Children had the opportunity to learn, see and even touch the

animals. We got to see a chicken called Nando, a tortoise called Michelle, snakes, cockroaches, leaf insects, and even a tarantula!  

We were all super brave and loved every minute! This experience was only made possible thanks to our families contributions to the children’s fund.

For more information on our children’s fund, how to make your contribution and what its used for please click on the link.  Children Fund Letter

 

Stay & Play sessions 

Big thank you to all the families who joined us in centre for a morning/afternoon of play. We we delighted to have you and our children are always so excited when their adult comes to visit.

 

Upcoming Events calendar

October 2025

Wednesday 1st – Book Bug (5pm – 5:30pm) – Bookbug sessions explore stories, song and rhyme with our children and their families.

Week commencing 13th – Ante-pre progress meetings – Parents/carers will be invited into centre using a booking system to discuss their child’s progress.

Week commencing 20th – 2yrs progress meetings – Parents/carers will be invited into centre using a booking system to discuss their child’s progress.

Saturday 25th October – Gardening Day (11am to 2pm) – Children and families throughout our school community are invited along to take part in our gardening day, helping to get our early years centre and school ready for the season ahead.

Week commencing 27th – Sponsored Broom Zoom – Children will raise money for the children’s fund by zooming round our grounds on broomsticks!

Week commencing 27th October – Introductory tours (3:15pm onwards, by appointment only). Prospective new P1 families are given the opportunity to arrange a visit to our school and take part in a tour around our building.

CPPS P1 families invite for tour

Spooky scavenger hunt 30th (5pm-6pm) – Children and families are invited to take part in our spooky scavenger hunt around school, we use our torches to search high and low for our Halloween surprises.

Tracking & Securing Children’s Progress

We are making changes to the way we document and secure our children’s progress.

Here is our WHY

Through observation and consultation with children/families and our staff team we have evaluated the time we spend writing up and documenting children’s learning and the time we get to physically be present, participate and scaffold learning experiences – we decided the balance was off!

We asked our children, to get a gauge of how much they took the lead on their learning and understood their learning. What are you learning about? When answering this question, most of the children spoke to us about the curricular learning throughout their environment and not their own personal journey.

We asked our parents what they thought about the observations that were put up for their children. Whilst all were complimentary about the detail that was put into each observation, the majority admitted they would by happy just with some photos to see what they had been up to – favouring twitter as our best form of communication.

What we have been doing

At present each staff member is given 2 hours off the floor per week to ensure planning and paperwork is up to date and that your child’s learning journey is documented. Given the number of staff in our team that means that each day there are 2 members of staff off the floor to allow for this. 4 hours in which children do not have that additional staff member each day.

We brought this to the staff team meeting at in-service and we searched for solutions. We discussed firstly from a staff member perspective their feeling towards the written workload. The consensus of the staff team was that with the demands of write up’s they were finding themselves struggling to settle into the moment as their minds would be preoccupied with all the other aspects of the job. As a staff team we are all in agreement this is not the service or provision we want to provide, we want to be present for the children, we want the freedom to follow their lead, we want to ensure quality provision with maximum interactions, and we want to do all this without compromising securing your children’s progress and development.

What we plan to do

Each staff member will be given 1 day every 6 weeks off the floor to evaluate their key children’s progress, planning for and setting challenge steps for moving forward. In between this time snapshot stories will be added with your child’s input to support their understanding of their learning journey. Staff will work hard to promote a sense of autonomy for your child in regard to their learning. Our journal systems will be used to document and track your child’s Health & Wellbeing, Literacy and Numeracy Progress throughout their time with us. Staff members will use their observations and knowledge of your child to support learning experiences and outcomes using their personals interests and vehicles for discovery.

Environment planning takes place alongside the children in the same way as before ensuring that children are exposed to and can explore cross curricular learning opportunities and experiences daily.

We intend to roll out our new way of working from next week. Week commencing 21st August 2023.

2 staff members each week will be given their non-contact time, and this will be staggered to ensure we are able to closely monitor and evaluate this new way of working. You will begin to see staff members use snapshot stories more often as they start to map your child’s journey alongside them.

We hope in turn, that you will be able to see an increase in your child’s understanding and confidence in their knowledge of how to share this journey with you.

Trial period

As with everything it is important that we enter a trial period, critically evaluating the provision we provide to ensure we continue to get it right for our children and families. We are proposing that our initial trial period for this is up until December this year at which point, we will be reaching out for feedback. We will be particularly interested to get feedback from those parents who are returning this year and have only known our way of working up until now.

In the interim if anyone has any questions, feedback, or suggestions please do not hesitate in contacting us.

Thank you as always for your continued support.

Team Colquhoun x

In the Moment Planning – How to save a Bee

In the moment, spontaneous or responsive planning is where some of our best and most memorable learning experiences come from. Having a highly experienced, skilled and creative workforce allows us to responded to the simplest of cues and turn it in to a magical learning experience for our children.

In our playground we found a Bee who was very tired, luckily one of our staff members knew just what to do and leapt in to action, taking a few of the children with her on this important rescue mission.

Did you know….

“If you find a tired bee in your home or outside, a simple solution of sugar and water will help revive an exhausted bee. Simply mix two tablespoons of white, granulated sugar with one tablespoon of water, and place on a spoon for the bee to reach”

Keeping our distance and helping our Bee
15 minutes later our Bee friend is beginning to move – We’ve done it!

Throughout this spontaneous experience our children demonstrated compassion, perseverance, and a real want to help others. We are so proud of our children daily, but this was a special moment; for us, for them and our new friend Mr. Bee.

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