Well the children had a relaxed day in their pyjamas and got comfy with cushions and blankets ready to watch a show. They also enjoyed popcorn as a special treat. Merry Christmas!
Category Archives: Special Event
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,
Santa’s Festive Garden 🎅🏼
Santa arrived in our Garden today and gave all of the children a present. He also left presents for the children who were not here. Santa loved our Garden and he said it was the best one he had visited this year so far. 
Thank you Santa from everyone at Cart Mill Family Centre.
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.
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.
‘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.
Music and Rythmn
Today was very exciting, we had a music teacher visit us. We had our listening ears on!! . We sang some new songs and followed the actions to warm ourselves up.
We all got to choose a musical instrument and learnt their names, we played them very loudly and really quietly. We moved the instruments around high and low then left and right to the beat and count of 1234.
Our teacher, a lovely lady called Lyndsey, then played a ukulele which is like a small guitar. We sang If You’re Happy and You Know It and then Sleeping Bunnies. As we all listened, and joined in, we got a sticker at the end. We are looking forward to next week to see what we will learn. 🎶.
Happy Diwali🪔
Today in the toddler room we have been learning all about Diwali and how it’s celebrated, we watched a lovely story on the smart board and the children picked out their favourite patterns.
We then decided to create our own Diwali patterns with coloured rice, here are some of the children’s great work. We used different mark making utensils and our fingers to create these lovely Diwali inspired patterns.
We finished the day off listening to some Diwali music and dancing with our rainbow ribbons.
