Milngavie Early Years Centre

Maureen being mobbed for a farewell cuddle

The children had made Maureen a book with lots of reasons why they will miss her and what they liked about her. One wee person said, “I like her legs!”

A special memory tree from staff !

Maureen was made to sit on our special chair – usually reserved for birthdays – and we all sang “Happy Retirement to You!”

Mr Graham presented Maureen with a lovely bouquet from the school and wished her a very happy retirement.

Today we said a very special goodbye to a wonderful colleague and friend.  After 22 years at Milngavie Nursery, Maureen Kennedy is retiring.

Maureen is an amazing Early Years Practitioner.  She has fabulous energy and has always worked incredibly hard to create highly stimulating and interesting learning environments for our children. Maureen has the ability to involve a WOW factor in everything she does – from organising her play resources in imaginative and inviting ways, to her inspired PE gym lessons.

Maureen has really excelled as our champion of outdoor play.  She has amazing knowledge of the natural world and is one of the very few of us that can pick up frogs, newts and earthworms with her bare hands!  When it comes to spiders – she has absolutely no fear.  She encourages this positive attitude in our children too, teaching respect for our natural world by shining example.  Maureen is a Forest Kindergarten expert and has made our Barloch Moor forest adventures a very enjoyable and memorable experience for all the children whom she has accompanied there.  She has the amazing talent of making every day a special one, and every child feel just how much she cares.

Maureen’s extensive professional experience and her personality – including a great sense of humour have made her a valuable and much loved colleague.  She will be very sadly missed.  We wish all wish her, and her lovely husband Gerry a very happy and well deserved retirement.

Our Care Inspectorate Report has been published and is ready for reading.  We are delighted with the results and would like to thank everyone who took time to return Inspection Questionnaires.  We were inspected on 2 quality indicators – Quality of Care and Support and Quality of Environment and have achieved EXCELLENT in both!

You can read the full report by clicking this link and selecting and downloading the Milngavie Nursery report at   https://www.careinspectorate.com/index.php/inspection-reports?page=2

If you would prefer to read a paper copy- there are copies available in the nursery hall.

We are all delighted to be back at Nursery, sharing our stories about our Christmas holidays and seeing all our friends again.

We are starting our year with a new initiative called Outside In, which allows children who love the outdoors to come straight in to our Playground area and play outside from the minute they arrive.  Our playground is the fenced area between the container and the nursery.  A member of staff will mark them onto the register and take a note of who is collecting them.  They will also note down their  choice of lunch, if they stay for Nursery lunch.  This is going to be available from 8am onwards for our early birds. and is designed to encourage active, outdoor physical play, immediately they arrive at nursery.  It should also make our cloakroom a little less congested at the beginning of sessions.  This will of course, be optional and you can always bring your child in through the front door to start their day indoors as usual,  if they wish.

We ask that only members of staff open our playground gate.  Only our children should come into nursery via the playground.  Parents should always access the nursery through the nursery door.  Children will always be collected from inside the nursery-  to ensure security.

We are hoping that these new arrangements will make nursery drop off much easier for those who choose to use them.  We are also excited to see how the children react to this as most of our children really love outdoor play and it will be really interesting to see how many choose to play out on arrival.

Please speak to staff if you have any questions about this, and let us know how you feel it works for your child.

Our lending library is open again for business – we would be very happy if you could return the books you have borrowed before borrowing more.  There are some great books to take home and enjoy together!

Our wonderful colleague – Mrs Maureen Kennedy – retired at the end of December.  Maureen has been a keyworker in our nursery since it opened in 1997 and has always been a firm favourite with our children.  She has been the Purple Group’s keyworker since August.  From today, Juliana Conti will take over as the Purple Group’s keyworker.  Juliana knows our children really well- she was responsible for supporting them at snack time all of last term.  If any parent has not yet met her, please just let us know and we can arrange a time for you to have a chat with her.

Maureen will be visiting the nursery on Wednesday morning for a fun-filled farewell from the children and staff.  Boxes of tissues are on the shopping list!

We are starting another 10 week block of SFA Coaching sessions for our pre-school children, from Thursday 16th January.  The sessions will be every Thursday between 9.50am and 10.30am and  cost £1 per session.  If your pre-school child does not usually attend on a Thursday morning you are welcome to bring them along to the infant gym to take part in the sessions, if you stay to watch.

We are looking forward to making 2020 a really great year in Milngavie Early Learning Centre, and would like to wish all our nursery community a very happy new year.

Wow! Christmas is here!

We have had a lovely December in nursery with all sorts of fun activities to celebrate the festive season!

A big THANK YOU VERY MUCH from all staff to families for our lovely Christmas gifts. Your kindness is really appreciated!

The nursery closes today and will re-open on Monday the 6th January (usual hours). Our amazing Early Years Practitioner Maureen is retiring at the end of December. We will have a special celebration day for Maureen in January.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our wonderful Milngavie ELCC families from all the nursery staff. We hope you have a fantastic time! 🙂 x

We are very excited to begin a new friendship with a nursery in Brittany, France – L’ecole Maternelle, Saint Therese! Here are some photos of our children launching this new initiative. We have designed some lovely Christmas cards to post to our new friends. In our photographs our posters say ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ and ‘Hello friends!’. We are learning about the Scottish and French flags and some basic French phrases! We will post regular updates on our blog. Thank you to the Aveniers for helping us to make this exciting connection.

Parents wishing to register their child for Primary 1 at Milngavie Primary are asked to make an appointment between Monday 13th January and Friday 17th January. There is a list of available appointment times (between 9:15 am and 12 noon) in the nursery – please select an appointment time by speaking with a member of nursery staff and write your name on the appointment sheet next to the chosen appointment time.

Appointments will take place in the main school building. Parents are asked to bring their child’s passport or birth certificate and 3 documents as proof of home address which must include: Council Tax Letter; Utility Bill; and one of the following – Child Benefit Letter, Bank Statement, Tax Credit Award Notice or Personal Child Health Record (Red Book).

We all had a fantastic time at the morning and afternoon Christmas parties today. The children enjoyed playing party games, disco dancing, a singalong with Susan from Snappy Sounds and a party snack! All the children were thrilled to see Santa and each child received a lovely present. Thank you Santa for coming to our party. We have lots of great photos of our party fun! Here are a few!

Our Christmas Concert is taking place on Monday at 11am in the Infant Gym (Infant Department in school). Parents and families are welcome to come along to hear us sing all of our favourite Christmas songs!

Please note that children who do not normally attend on a Monday morning can join in too (come along to nursery at 10:40 to get ready).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

We are very lucky to have a number of students working with us this session in the nursery. Our students are studying for a range of qualifications linked to Early Years. All students have settled in well and formed great relationships with our children. We would like to thank all our students for everything they do to help the nursery run smoothly and we are looking forward to continuing to work together and support their learning next session.

We hope they enjoy their time with us at Milngavie Nursery. Pictured are some of our students (L-R Iain, Susan and Eleanor).

At Milngavie Nursery we use a Word Aware approach to explore books, storytelling, characters and new vocabulary. We select titles based on children’s interests and design learning opportunities around their ideas. For December we are exploring the themes and vocabulary from ‘Stick Man’ (Julia Donaldson).

Stick Man goes for a jog one day but things don’t quite go as planned. He finds himself in all sorts of troubling situations as he tries to get back to his family.

Initial discussions with the children to get our project started!

 As well as reading the book together we will also use these beautiful Stick Man pebbles to tell and retell the story.

Parents as Partners in Learning –

We will focus on one word per week based on topics covered in the story.

Week 1 – Stick (w/c 2^nd Dec)

Week 2 – Family (w/c 9^th Dec)

Week 3 – Santa (w/c 16^th Dec)

You can support Word Aware learning in a number of ways!

• Ask your child to tell you about the Stick Man story, discuss some of the characters and share their favourite part.
• Help your child to learn the ‘Word of the Week’ by clapping out the syllables and saying the word over and over – we say it loudly and quietly, fast and slow. This is a fun way to learn any new words.
• Encourage your child to describe what each word means, use it in a sentence and think of other words that mean the same (or a similar) thing.
• Talk about words that rhyme.