Milngavie Early Years Centre

Happy Monday!!  Welcome to a shorter week at nursery – this Friday and next Monday are our Half Term Holiday and nursery will be closed.

This week in nursery we are starting our Word Aware program – aimed at increasing children’s vocabulary, with rhyme awareness at group time. We will be reading rhyming poems and stories and looking for the rhyming words.  We will also be singing the nursery Silly Song which rhymes our names and is great fun.

Our Parents’ Night is on Thursday 11th October – the sheet for appointments is now on the back of the door in the nursery hall.  If you would like to come along to see your child’s keyworker – please sign up for an appointment.  If the 11th is not suitable, it is possible to make an appointment to see your keyworker at the beginning or end of a nursery session- please speak to Valerie to arrange this.  If you ever have any concerns or have information you want to share about your child, please do not hesitate to speak to your keyworker – we can always make time to have a chat.

Yellow and Green groups will be visiting the infant gym on Wednesday for fun and games!

Great news!  The exit button for the inner door of the nursery has been moved to the right of the door, instead of above it.  This makes it more accessible.  It is still quite high up, but has to be so the children can’t reach it.

We have had a lot of interest in babies recently in the nursery and some of our wee dollies and prams have seen better days.  Some of them are positively vintage and ready for retiral (a bit like some of our staff – ha ha!)

If you have any prams or dolls that your child has grown out of, or know someone who might have some we would be delighted to rehome them.  We can promise them a life of lots of walks and bottles, regular changing and lots of lovely, enthusiastic, wee parents.

We would like to extend an invitation to parents and carers to come along and contribute their skills to our nursery.  If you like to read stories, do crafty things, science things, dramatic things, building things,or perhaps like gardening, sing or play music, or even like tidying cupboards – we would love you to visit us.

We also would like to have visitors who could tell the children about the jobs they do.  It is really good for our children to meet new, interesting people and learn about their lives.

Visits from parents and carers enrich the children’s learning and staff love them too!  We have a very special nursery community at Milngavie ELC and, if you have time we would love to see you in our playrooms or garden.

Visiting nursery is also a great way of seeing what your child gets up to during their nursery session and gives them a chance to show them round their nursery and show you what they like doing here.

If you would like to come in, please just let us know.  We make a nice cup of tea too- and might even be able to provide a biscuit or two!!!

Yesterday in nursery Maureen and Pam had set up visually attractive activities that really were an invitation to the children to play. 

Pam had put paints and a still life of a fruit bowl on the painting table and some of the paintings created were absolutely wonderful.

Maureen’s Playdough table was full of wee loose parts to add to the dough and she had provided cake cases and interesting utensils.  It looked amazing.  

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!

The PTA Halloween Discos this year are on 26th October, in the Town Hall.  The wee ones’ disco – Nursery to P3 – is 6pm til 7.15pm.  There will be games and dancing and a tuck shop and lots and lots of halloween fun.  Fancy dress is optional and tickets cost £4.    Tickets will be available soon.
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Happy Monday!  We are all set for another great week in Nursery.  Yesterday lots of families came along to the orchard/garden workday and have made an amazing difference to our outdoor space.  The children picked loads of brambles for us and we are having them for snack this morning.  Work on the wooden steps and one of the retaining walls was done, the rotting pergola was demolished, the last big wilderness corner in the orchard was tamed, new wildflower plants were planted all along the orchard fence, and in the ground beside the nursery playground.  Lots and lots of weeds were cleared and the compost bins filled to overflowing.  Everyone worked really hard and we all enjoyed Katie’s amazing BBQ.  Many, many thanks to everyone who came along- you did an absolutely champion job!  Extra special thanks to Anne Madsen – our amazing project manager – who coordinates it all and always knows what needs to be done.

This week we will be exploring the garden and harvesting our potato crop!  We are also thinking about what would be good to plant in the polytunnel!  We are hoping to be outside as much as possible as there is always something to discover in our amazing outdoor learning environment.

We are hoping to start some group time in nursery this week, thinking about what we would like to have as our nursery rules.  There is a wall in the hall which shows possible lines of development for learning, but as always when planning learning, we will be guided by what the children decide.  If you have any ideas you want to contribute, we would be delighted to include these too – please just speak to any member of staff or write them down in the suggestions book beside the learning wall.

Wednesday is gym day – 2 groups will be visiting the gym for fun and games.

Many thanks for the donations of girls clothes and junk.  We now have a good stock of spare clothes.  We always need donations of junk because we have loads of creative wee junk sculptors just waiting for new materials.

Here are some photos of the gardening day!

Please be advised that the car park outside our nursery is the school staff car park.  During school hours the car park is out of bounds to visitors and parents,  as, if you park between 8.30 and 3.30, you may block a member of staff in.  Please park in Hillcrest Street or Hillhead Street instead.  Members of staff can get very upset if they are prevented from leaving for courses, meetings etc and may not be so polite when they ask you to move!!!!  🙂

PLEASE PARK ON THE STREET INSTEAD!

Thank you for your cooperation!

Do you have any girls leggings, trousers, socks and pants that your wee one has grown out of?  Our clothing stock for girls has disappeared and we would welcome any donations to put in our cupboard.

We are also looking for old CD’s, corks, carpet samples, old clocks, keyboards, phones, ropes, stones, shells, nets, cable drums, crates, boxes, pallets, old suitcases (any size)- to use in Loose Parts Play.  We would be very grateful for anything that might prove stimulating to investigative play.

Thank you!

We are currently on Week 2 of the lunch menu.  Staff felt it might be helpful for parents to have a note of what is what is for lunch each week.