Eid Mubarak to all our Muslim families. We have been learning about Ramadan and Eid festivities and shared a story Aleena brought into nursery. Some of our children told us about how they celebrated Eid last Wednesday with their families.
“I went to the Mosque and I got presents. I got a microphone.” Ayla.
“It wasn’t a good Eid because it was raining. We had to watch for puddles when we were getting our photos taken.” Zara.
“I got my hands painted with Mendhi”. Zainab.
“So did I.” Azan.
This year we have developed particularly strong community links with Asda, Newton Mearns. Leigh Hamilton regularly engages with us and supports our children’s learning through a range of experiences including baking, creative, planting and gardening.
Last Saturday we had a very successful ECO day. Staff, families and friends all mucked in to ensure our garden looks its best. Bark and stones were spread in Toadstool Tales, a bottle top mosaic was produced, the sand pit filled, vegetable plots weeded, cable drums painted, flowers planted, strimming and power washing carried out and many more jobs. A huge thank you to everyone who helped. 
All services providing early learning and childcare in Scotland must be registered with the Care Inspectorate and are regularly monitored and awarded grades. Inspections are unannounced. We recently had an inspection and we are delighted to share with you the inspection report. Please take some time to read this.
www.careinspectorate.com/berengCareservices/html/reports/getPdfBlob.php?id=302598
Glenwood Family Centre were inspected in two aspects, Quality of care and support and Quality of staffing and we were graded excellent for both.
I am sure you will recognise that the commitment and professionalism of the staff team are a real strength of our centre and we strive to continue to maintain excellent standards in ensuring the highest quality care and support for all our learners.
We have noticed some changes!
Our seeds have started to change.
“Look, our plants are growing!”
“We need to give them water so they grow bigger.”
Lots of excitement with the changes to the seeds.
We have been planting sunflower seeds.
“They need to be in the soil or they will be freezing!”
“When are they going to grow?”
“I think mine will be a rainbow sunflower.”
We have been celebrating British Science Week. Have you been taking part in our daily science challenges? Each day this week we have been displaying a challenge on our plasma screen (in the corridor) and sharing this on Twitter for you and your child to carry out at home. Why not take a photo or send a tweet to let us know how you have got on.
Our Family Fun Bags this week contain the items needed to carry out Friday’s challenge. We had a great time trying this out this week!
We have been experimenting with a Balloon Rocket. The children followed the instructions had a countdown.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … 🚀🚀🚀#BritishScienceWeek pic.twitter.com/Pbxix0Uivg— GlenwoodFamilyCentre (@GlenwoodFC) March 13, 2019
Our block play area is so popular and versatile. We use the blocks in so many ways. We have opportunities for risky play as we climb and create slides. 
Recently we have been very interested in performing so we created a stage. We have been dancing, singing and playing instruments while the audience watch us perform. 
 
We even used the large planks as guitars!
We have been using images of famous buildings and landmarks around the world to build using the small blocks. Can you recognise the places we have built?
    
We love to have pretend picnics in the quiet room… so we decided to have a real one! We wrote invitations to invite our friends and we had lots of preparations to do. 
We made bunting to decorate the room.
We planned our menu. 
Once we decided what we wanted to eat we made shopping lists and will be visiting the shops to purchase what we need.
  
  We can’t wait to have our picnic!
We have been creating repeating patterns. 
Our Children’s Committee met recently to discuss what we can do for Fairtrade Fortnight. They created a mind map of ideas.
The children decided to use some Fairtrade ingredients to bake banana cup cakes. We followed a recipe and we had lots of measuring and weighing to do.
The cup cakes tasted yummy! We thought it would be a great idea to sell the ingredients in our Family Fun Bags to allow everyone the chance to make Fairtrade banana cup cakes at home.
We are starting monthly sessions of Bookbug and Musicality (Literacy through music) for parents and their Glenwood children. Please come along and join us. Let us know if you can manage to allow us to organise the children.
We are continuing to develop our literacy through puppets. We decided to make our puppet theatre even more inviting and we used the internet to see what traditional puppet theatres look like. We also searched for more ways to make puppets and decided to make sock puppets.
If you would like to make a sock puppet at home, look out for our Family Fun Bags on sale this week and containing all you will need to make a puppet.
As part of our induction to Glenwood programme, we invite children who will be starting soon to join us for Bookbug sessions. Many other children joined in too.
We love to hear stories and we have been listening to one of our favourites read to us by the author. Michael Rosen is the author of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” and we can join in with the actions as he reads this story.
We loved this story so much we decided to make props and puppets to retell it. We made a big bear puppet and some long swishy grass.
I wonder what else we will need to make to tell this story?
We have enjoyed some Chinese food for snack this week as part of our celebrations for the Chinese New Year.
“I don’t like the noodles but I like the rice.” Naomi.
“It’s good and yummy.” Marnie.
“I don’t like the stir fry. My daddy likes stir fry.” Euan.
“Lovely. I want some more. It’s delicious. I don’t like the corn.” Matthew.
This week we have been creating stories with Mrs Kerr from the early literacy team. We used story dice to think about the characters and setting and events of the story. We wrote our stories in our story book and we illustrated them. Today we acted out our stories.
Look at the fantastic model we have built using our large blocks!
  
We have been using puppets to re-tell familiar stories.
We decided to hold a puppet show and made tickets for the audience.
We began to create our own stories and wanted different characters for our puppet shows and so we made our own!
We especially like telling stories using our Transformer puppets!
