Milngavie Early Years Centre

Lynn provided some lovely soapy paint and straws in the art area this week and the children had great fun creating bubble pictures.  Dionne then took a tub of bubbles outside and blew them so the children could catch them – “They’re rainbow bubbles!” said Isla.

Pam has been our mad scientist this week – finally perfecting her recipe for slime.  The malleable play table has had a lot of interesting textures to get into and these two lads made fabulous face accessories with a lovely batch of foamy slime.  Beardylicious!

Ailsa and Holly, after finishing the ramp, went on to do an absolutely top job of tidying up the garden.  Holly helped Elisabeth sweep the boardwalk and Ailsa and Ava cleaned up our very muddy mud kitchen.  We all agreed that we felt better for seeing the place all tidy.  Top job girls!

This morning the blue group took up the challenge of cleaning up our very messy ramp.  What amazing workers!  Dexter told us we all needed to give each other a fist pump (putting your fists together) before we started just to get us into the team spirit.  It really worked!  Every single one of the Blue group worked so hard – we filled two wheel barrows with all the gravel and sand we swept up, and wheeled it round to dump on the garden path.  Great job everyone!

Today we are going to be responsible citizens and help look after our environment.  We are going to make a start on tidying up our outdoor areas again to make them beautiful places to play.  If  the children are involved, they realise what goes in to maintaining our environment and value it more.  Many wee hands make light work! Wait till you see what can all achieve together!

This morning Judit came to nursery to start her Spanish Sessions with the children.  The Red, Green and Yellow Groups all met Judit and her extra special little Spanish Ladybird called Rossa.  Rossa has magic powers and when Judit puts her on her finger, Judit can only speak Spanish!  We learned the Spanish words for 3 colours – red, blue and green or rojo (pronounced rrrroho), azul (pronounced athool) and verde (pronounced beerrrrde!)  We played games with the colours, hunting for rojo, azul and verde items and saying the colour in Spanish as we matched the colour with the coloured boxes Judit had bought.  We then made colour trains and had to decide which one was longest – verde was the winner!

We learned that “Ola!” means hello and that “Gracias” (pronounced grathias)  means thankyou.  At the very end we said “Adios” to Rossa and Judit – the Spanish for goodbye.

Judit is coming back next Monday to work with the Blue and Orange groups so the children’s Spanish Sessions will be once every two weeks.  We are going to practise our Spanish words at homebase time too so we don’t forget what we have learned.  Ian’s comment sums up the way we all felt- “Spanish is great fun!”  Gracias Judit!

Good morning – it’s the beginning of another busy week in Milngavie Nursery with lots to see, do and learn and hopefully plenty of fun to be had doing it!

All our new recruits are settling in and getting used to the idea that, “Mummy always comes back!”  We ask a lot of our new wee ones – new environment, new adults, new children and coming in on their own.  Well done to each and every one of them!!!

We are very excited today- Judit- Guerau’s mum, is coming in to nursery to teach us some Spanish.  She is going to come on Monday mornings and we are really looking forward to learning in Spanish.    We will make a Spanish wall in the Discovery room I will put the things we are learning on the blog so we can all learn together.

Our wee playhouse is being repaired by Euan’s dad- Shaun,  and Katie has bought a mega-loud shed alarm which we will be putting on when the door goes back on.

Today we are also doing some flat pack construction of shoe racks for the cloakroom – always good fun- I wonder how many screws we will be left with today?

At homebase time we are focusing on Nursery Rhymes and rhyming words this week and starting  PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Skills) with our pre-school children.

APPEAL FOR JUNK, COLLAGE MATERIALS AND NEWSPAPERS

Lynn would be very grateful for any of the above to enhance our art and junk modelling area.  Old buttons, bits of material etc would be wonderful.  Lynn is encouraging the children’s creativity with different media in the art area this week – painting today!!

Susan came to nursery this morning for the first time since the holidays and told us something very exciting.  This term we are going to be Musical Investigators- we have to use our listening skills for this- lucky we’ve been practising this week!

Our first musical investigation was counting to four and playing 1,2,3,4-1,2,3,4 with Susan’s egg maracas.  We then started to move to the beat and Grant and Jonah noticed that this beat makes you march.  Mr Snappy had brought an agogo in his back pack and Aaruv was chosen to play a march on it for us.  He was really good and we all marched around the playroom while Aaruv played for us.

Susan then did some magic and turned the agogo beather into a wand and Orla into a fairy princess.  She turned all the other children into toy soldiers who were asleep.  She put on some wonderful marching music and Orla woke all the soldiers up by waving her wand.  We all marched to the music until it was time to go back to sleep.  We were all very tired – marching is quite exhausting really.

I wonder what we will be investigating on Susan’s next visit?