This week we are going to take the children’s ideas for rules and put them on display in the nursery hall- we had some great ideas- some like -“Sweets for snack” – we had to discuss, and think about very carefully. We have now come up with a shortlist and will put them up this week. Having fun is rule number one!!!
We have been welcoming our new students from local colleges to nursery. So far, we have HNC students, Sarah Thomson and Erin Feng on Mondays and Tuesdays, Seonaid Campbell and Siobhan Bonar, NC students on Thursday and Friday. Ashley Hearne, another HNC student will be joining us soon on Wednesdays and Thursdays. We hope they will enjoy their placements at Milngavie ELC and welcome them all to the staff team. I’ll try to get their photos on the blog and in the nursery foyer this week, so parents can put faces to names.
This morning I am visiting Meadowburn ELC to look at the work they have done to become a “Language and Communication Friendly Nursery”. This is an accreditation that we are working towards this year, with support from our Speech and Language colleagues and our school’s Educational Psychologist. To achieve this we will be changing our practice – it challenges us to think more carefully about the way we speak to children, and encourage language within our centre and we will be altering the environment to make sure that it provides the right level of stimulation and is supportive of children. As we progress with it, we would really welcome your comments on the changes we make. We have already made quite a few changes, with neutral colours and less visual clutter. We are labelling our resources more clearly, with pictures and words and are going to display a visual list of daily activities for the children to read each morning, to let them know what’s going on each day. Our rules will be visual too. We are all interested to see the impact the changes will make on the children’s perception of our nursery and will be consulting them too, to see what they think of the changes.
We are going to have a Parents’ Evening on Thursday 11th October. We will be putting an appointments sheet for each group up in the hall next Monday.
On Friday we are starting our PAThS sessions – (Promoting Alternative Thinking Skills). These are lessons designed to encourage children to identify their emotions and those of other people, and to build emotional resilience. Our sessions are good fun – they involve a wee turtle puppet called Twiggle and his friends!
