Milngavie Early Years Centre

Sorry- I only noticed yesterday that our Facebook feed was not up to date. I have hopefully reconnected and solved the problem. Testing it now- fingers crossed!

Many, many thanks to all the people who came along to our Sunday work day in the garden.  Anne and Shaun worked incredibly hard to make the new raised bed to replace one of the ones that have rotted.  Thanks to all the families that came along to help, the gabions are now full of gravel, the veg beds have been dug over, the new raised bed looks amazing!  Our garden is an awful lot safer than it used to be and is becoming a beautiful space again!

Many thanks to Giselle for these fab photos!

It’s a beautiful autumn day and we are having a day in the orchard today.  At the weekend a working party has been in the garden taking out more of the rotten wood, building a new raised bed and filling the gabions with gravel to finish them off.  The beds which had the potatoes in have been dug over and the garden is beginning to look beautiful again.  Many, many thanks to the families who came along to help Anne and Shaun achieve all this.  Anne has brought us some of her apple crop from home to allow us to make some apple juice in our orchard apple press.  We are hoping that our wee baby trees, which have been growing well this year, might begin to produce apples for us next year.  In the meantime we are very grateful to Anne for her apples.  If you have an apple tree and a lot of surplus apples, please bring them in and we will make some lovely apple juice for snack.

This week in nursery we are looking at the changes Autumn has brought to the outside world.  We are going to be collecting beautiful autumn leaves, conkers, acorns and all sorts of seeds and bringing them in to nursery to use them creatively for inspiration in our paintings and models, and to examine more closely on our interest table.  We will be thinking about why it is getting colder and the nights are getting darker earlier  and enjoying seasonal fruit at snack time.  For our children this is only their 3rd or 4th Autumn on this planet so it is really new and exciting.  We will be extending the vocabulary of autumn and displaying new words we are introducing as part of our Word Aware program, on the hall walls.

Maureen is  creating a “What fills our bucket?” display in the hall, gathering children’s comments on what makes them happy.  Well worth a read!

On Wednesday we are taking the children for an Autumn Walk to Barloch Moor, to look at the effects of the change of the season on our woodlands.  It is also a chance for our pre-schoolers to look at where we will be going for our Forest Kindergarten sessions this year.  Fingers crossed for a beautiful, crisp day.

On Wednesday Kate and Dionne are attending a 5 to Thrive Conference at Kilmardinny House – we’ll let you know what was all about later in the week.

On Friday we are having another happy Snappy Sounds Music Session with Susan and her animal friends.

4 PGDE Students from Strathclyde University joined our nursery team this morning.    We are delighted to welcome them to Milngavie ELCC and hope they will really enjoy their time here, and learn lots about the world of 3-5 year olds.  They are teaching students on their Nursery Teaching Placement. They will be with us for the next 2 weeks.  They are:

Morven Quinn

Helen Maynard

Katie Clark

Kirsty Semple-Barr

On Wednesday Julie went to a conference at the SECC to find out what it would take to make sure that our whole nation is ACE aware.   Speakers included Dr Nadine Burke Harris, Suzanne Zeedyk, Tina Hendry,  Professor Harry Burns, John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon.

ACES are adverse childhood experiences.  Recent research has shown conclusive links between these experiences and most social problems – learning difficulties, poor mental and physical health, substance misuse and crime.  The more ACES in a child’s life, the more likely they are to experience difficulties throughout their lives.

As educators, ACES have a profound significance – they can effectively prevent children’s ability to learn and lessen a child’s chance of good well-being.  Julie is our ACES champion in nursery – she has a real interest and passion for the subject and has joined the EDC ACES forum, follows ACE related material on Twitter and has also attended several courses.  This conference brought together educators, psychologists, violence reduction specialists, medical experts, childrens’ charities and politicians to ask the question -“How do we make Scotland the World’s first ACE-aware nation?

Julie was really impressed by the standard and passion of all the speakers – all of them experts in their field.  She particularly enjoyed James Docherty’ s speech on ACES to Assets: How can we help the wounded if we can’t show our wounds?  James Docherty had an extremely tough childhood and he became involved in substance misuse and crime.  When his own daughter was born, he heard about ACES and became determined that his daughter’s life would be different.  Identifying the effects of ACES on his own life helped him break the cycle and he has become an inspirational, passionate campaigner for ACES awareness.  He is living proof that by understanding childhood trauma and addressing what it has done, it is possible to come out the other side and lead a fulfilled and happy life.

Julie also felt that the other stand out speaker was Nicky Murray – the Head Teacher of Burnside Primary School. whose talk on “Building resilience:  One school’s story of putting well-being at the heart of learning” really resonated with her as an educator.   He has put compassion at the heart of the ethos of his school and is really seeing the difference, as stressed children are becoming comfortable enough to be able to learn.

There was a lot that Julie came back with from the conference, that we will be able to use in our nursery.  As well as the inspirational ideas and strategies, she brought details of lots of different schemes and programs people are using around the country to raise awareness of ACES and combat their effect.

Understanding and combating the effects of ACES is crucial if we are ever to narrow the attainment gap in our nation’s schools.  More importantly though it is essential if we are to become a fairer, healthier and happier society.  It starts with all of us!!!!

Mr Graham visited the Scottish Learning Festival last week and brought us back a surprise!  An amazing resource for encouraging children’s creative writing.  It’s called Mighty Writer.  It’s on the wall in our writing area and is already proving very popular.  It has really attractive visuals and it also introduces words to start our sentences with.  It gives children a sense of the beginning, middle and end of a story and encourages the use of adverbs and adjectives.  The children see it as an enjoyable game and we are excited that we can introduce writing in a really fun way, encouraging dynamic storytelling, with less emphasis on the need to put pencil to paper- something that our children often are not ready to do.

From the moment we put it on the wall, we started getting very exciting stories.

Emily wrote:

Once upon a time there was a naughty witch who liked to turn everyone into aliens.  One day she was in her tree house and she magicked up some fruit and magicked up a treasure chest.  Suddenly a mermaid appeared and turned her into a diamond, as sparkly as the moon.

Keiran wrote:

There once was a strong quiet robot who was quite big who liked to do all kinds of stuff.  He had some money and a witch stole it and threw it in the water and the robot went into a submarine.  He landed on the moon where a cave was and he found treasure!!!!! He was a really happy robot!

Callum wrote:

Once there was a fierce, two headed monster.  He met a girl who turned him into two people using her magic wand.  Then they went to a circus tent where they met a mermaid who did mermaid magic.  Then the sun came out and they went up into the air in a hot air balloon and landed on a magic carpet with a BUMP!

Isla L wrote:

Once upon a time there was a very strong wind and he blew the sun out of the sky – it landed on a house.  The girl who lived in the house had to run out.  She ran to a man’s house and he gave her some cake.  When the girl had gone to her bed, the man took the sun on a trampoline.  He boinged it up into the sky again and they all lived happily ever after!

Wow – if this is what our wee authors can write as a first attempt, what will they be doing by June!!

If you would like to have a look at this fabulous, new resource please feel free to come into the Discovery Zone playroom and have a look.

Happy  Wet Wednesday!  In nursery this morning, our pre-schoolers are having vision checks.  If your Pre schooler does not usually come in on a Wednesday morning you are still welcome to bring them.  If you cannot make it, don’t worry – you will get an appointment from the clinic to go along and have vision checked there.

On Friday we are having a visit from Susan and Mr Snappy for another musical adventure- its just the best way to end a happy nursery week!

If you require childcare during the October week, you can now apply for this.  The forms are in the nursery hall under the parents notice board.

Parents evening appointment times are on the back of the inner door, in the nursery hall.  If you can’t make it on the 11th Oct and would like to see your child’s keyworker for a chat, please just ask and we can arrange a time for you.

At the weekend, Eric very kindly came in with his chainsaw and chopped up and moved the huge tree that had fallen into the nursery.  This must have been a mammoth effort!!!  This is great as it would have taken the council months to get round to it.  Many thanks Eric!!

We would like to say a huge thank you to Eric Avenier, one of our new nursery dads, for the tremendous amount of work he has done in our school orchard. Last weekend, Eric cleared a horrible patch of brambles and weeds beside the nursery and found us two holly trees and a horse chestnut! He also discovered our hedgehog house which was so overgrown that it was uninhabitable.  Eric has now covered it with branches and it is the perfect “des res” for hibernating hedgehogs again. Fingers crossed that we might attract some spikey wee residents soon. Eric also cut ALL the grass- a mammoth task -and sorted out weeds round the football pitch.  Since Eric’s son, Emile, came to nursery, Eric has worked tirelessly to improve the orchard experience for our children.  He has brought us plants, planted carrots and peas in our polytunnel and brought delicious peas, courgettes and pumpkins from his own allotment which we have eaten in nursery.  All this and Eric still finds time to be a world class chef and do his most important job- being Emile’s daddy -too! What a man! 

After being cooped up on Thursday because of the very high winds, it was lovely to get out into the Orchard on Friday morning.  We found that the storm had blown down one of the trees at the back of the nursery.  It was the perfect chance to explore the tree top and see parts of the tree that only the birds usually see.  We found lots of big bunches of helicopter seeds and had a great time climbing in and out of the branches! An experience like this not only deepens our understanding of trees, but is a lesson in how strong natural forces can be.

On Friday we had our first PAThS session.   PAThS is short for Promoting Alternative Thinking Skills and is a specially designed program which increases children’s awareness of emotions and managing our feelings.   The program involves scripted lessons, puppets, social story books involving the main characters, and lots of resources for follow up art and craft activities.  The materials for the program will be on show at Parents Evening but if you would like to have a look at them this week, just ask.

We began by looking at the rules for PAThS circle time.  We read a sad story about a nursery with no rules- it sounded pretty ghastly and we all agreed that Milngavie ELCC is much better, because we all know how to behave and are kind to each other.   We then talked about the rules we need to remember when sitting in our PAThS circle- legs in a basket, hands to ourselves, good listening, gentle touches, hands up when you want to say something and being quiet until it is your turn to talk. Then we met Twiggle the turtle, our main PAThS  puppet character, who had brought some of his friends along to meet us. His friends were hiding in a bag and we had to guess the kind of animal they were from clues . Twiggle is going to help us learn to identify our emotions and find ways to build resilience and good self esteem.  Next week we are going to be learning about the importance of compliments and will be thinking of lots of nice things to say to our friends.

Here are our PAThS characters: