Category Archives: Special Event

Kung Hey Fat Choi

Today at Cart Mil we have been celebrating Lunar New Year 2022 by participating in various activities both indoors and outdoors! 2022 is the year of the tiger. We discussed the features of a tiger then decided to look for stripes while out for a walk. Look at all the stripes we found….

We also enjoyed having a race through the woods and a play in the spider park on the way back to nursery.

For snack today we sampled different foods that might be eaten during Lunar New Year celebrations.

We enjoyed tasting noodles, rice and lychees!

In the Home room we decided to make our own fortune cookies which were delicious!

We decided to make our playdough the same colours as a tiger and had lots of fun creating our own Lunar New Year tigers!

In the Discovery room we used our interactive board to research  the history of Lunar New Year.

We used our creativity and imagination in the Studio today to make celebration ribbons and streamers. We then used them to recreate our own Lunar New Year celebration dance.

We have had so much fun celebrating and learning the history of Lunar New Year.

Kung Hey Fat Choi!

 

 

Celebrating Robert Burns 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Today the children celebrated Burns’ Day with a variety of different experiences throughout the centre.

Out in the garden the children made Scotch pancakes cooked on our fire. They enjoyed measuring and mixing the ingredients and watched whilst Fiona cooked them on the fire pit. They demonstrated good listening skills whilst being told about how to keep safe around the fire.

Continuing the Scottish theme, some of the children used their creative skills to design their own tartan using paint and cars. They rolled their car in the paint then onto their paper.

In the Home Room the children asked to make flapjacks. They measured each of the ingredients, developing both numeracy and literacy skills. After mixing them together they used the clock to time how long they took to cook in the oven. They even assisted with cleaning up.

The children in the Discovery Room read a story by Rebecca Colby and Kate McLelland about a wee lassie who swallowed a midgie! They watched a short story on the life of Robert Burns and enjoyed some highland dancing.

The children love to sing at Cartmill and today was no exception. In the Studio they learned some Scottish songs; Coulter’s Candy, 3 Craws sat upon a Wa’ and Pop a little pancake into a pan. They even joined in, playing musical instruments.

All the children enjoyed tasting some haggis, neeps and tatties for snack and tasted some of their flapjacks.

Christmas Concerts

The children were amazing today performing for the parents and family members who had come along to watch in our garden.

We loved having the ponies, Annabelle and Eddie to join us.

The children got the chance to feed them and their favourite snack is carrots.

The children give us year-round joy and it was so lovely to have our parents and families here with us today to share in that joy.

Making Christmas memories

Today in the home room the children have been busy making their very own Christmas tree ornaments  using salt dough and their own creative skills!

We demonstrated good social skills by working together to carefully measuring the ingredients and adding them to a bowl to mix.

We exercised our manipulative and fine motor skills  and we strengthened our muscles through lots of mixing, kneading, rolling and cutting our dough.

We listened carefully and demonstrated we are very careful when using an oven as it can get very hot! We baked our dough  shapes in the oven to make them hard.

We decorated our decorations with our own choice of coloured paint, glitter and snow dust. We then tied some beautiful ribbon to them so we can hang them on our tree,


It’s Christmas time!!

Today the children got into the Christmas spirit when we made Gingerbread people! We explored different smells and textures when baking our cookies, and our favourite one was the “ginger” and “sticky golden syrup”. It was quite tricky at first to mix as the mixture was very tough for our little muscles, but with good team work, we managed to make a nice yummy dough. We developed our muscles some more rolling the dough nice and flat and cutting out our shapes.

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When the gingerbread people had cooled down, we explored our fine motor skills by decorating them with some fancy buttons and happy faces. Some children even made a “skirt” and “big muscles”.

It’s beginning to look like Christmas

The children received a lovely surprise when they arrived this morning. Yesterday two beautiful Christmas Trees were delivered. One for the front door and the other placed in the Home Room.

The children said it looked very bare and asked if they could decorate it. They found the box of decorations and picked out the ornaments they would like to put on.

Look, I like this star
I have a bell

The children also found some tinsel and some lights.

The children noticed that some of the branches were white and it looked like snow!

A star on the top completes their tree.

Our wonderful decorators!

‘All it needs now is some presents!’

After the tree was finished the children decided to make festive play dough. They used red and green glitter to make it sparkle.

M made her own wee Christmas tree with a star on the top just like the one in our Home Room.

The children are now getting excited about the big day.

Exploring Tartan

With St Andrew’s day this week, the children have been discussing all things Scottish. We decided to have a look at tartan fabric. First, we did some research on how tartan was made. The coloured threads are made from wool and you usually need between two and six colours to make the pattern on the fabric. A machine called a loom is threaded up and it moves forwards and backwards, weaving the threads together to make the design. We discovered that you need over 7 metres of material to make one kilt!!

We also had fun looking for our own family tartans. One child found out that theirs has some red in it red. Some of us could not find our tartan so we decided to make our own Cart Mill family tartans. The children were very creative using cars, wooden blocks and cotton reels rolled in paint before moving them across the paper to create a chequered, tartan design. The children also chose some tartan strips of paper to cut and glue onto their kilts. Cutting helps develop a child’s fine motor skills by encouraging independent movement of each finger, it also promotes hand/eye coordination.
We then decorated our room with our lovely new tartans. Why don’t you have a look and find out if you have a family tartan, if not, you could make one too!

We look forward to learning more about Scotland and its heritage this week.

Clydebuilt Puppet Theatre

On Wednesday we had a visit from Clydebuilt  Puppet Theatre. They told us three cautionary tales- The Ungrateful Crocodile which taught us to be kind to others who are kind to us, The Forgotten Treasure which is about being grateful for what you have and a good old favourite Red Riding Hood- The Wolf’s Story.

The children absolutely loved watching the show! There were lots of oohs and aahs and plenty of giggles too. Thank you so much to Steve and Leigh for the wonderful performances.