June 22, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Graduation Film links now on your Learning Journal for our Pre-school Children

Pre-school children should have 2 new stories in their learning journals which contain links to the graduation slideshows and films that we took on graduation day. As you will see, our graduations went really well and the only thing that was missing was our families. We were really sad that we could not have you in the audience this year. Our little ante-pre-schoolers stood in though and did a marvellous job of clapping and cheering and also sang along with all the songs as well.

We really hope you enjoy the films. As you will see, our filming techniques leave a lot to be desired and we apologise for the slightly wonky presentation. We filmed it as it happened and in one take so sometimes it is pretty rough. We would like to thank our colleague Erin McGarrity, who kindly edited the films for us. The films do give a flavour of our graduation celebrations though and we are so proud of all our children, every single one of them performed beautifully. A graduation is a great way to celebrate the achievements of the last two years. We have really loved having your child at nursery and getting to know them. We wish them the very best of luck for lots of happiness in Primary 1 and all the years beyond. They will always be a part of our Milngavie Nursery family and have a warm place in the hearts of all our staff.

June 10, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Orchard gardening day – Sunday 13th June- volunteers very welcome!

Our last Family Gardening Day of this school year is on Sunday from 1-3pm. The orchard is looking amazing and the flowers that have been planted look beautiful. Many classes in the school have been studying butterflies this month and we have all released them into the flowerbeds. Thanks to our volunteering families of gardeners, there are lots of flowers for them to feed on.

On Sunday we are putting up some fences to protect the Primary 5’s wild life garden and putting in lots of raspberry bushes at the back of the orchard. As always there will be jobs for all abilities and ages and we would love to see you.

Please feel free to bring your own picnic if the weather is nice. Fingers and toes crossed for a lovely day!

June 10, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Graduation Dates

We are having our graduations next week – The Rainbow Room graduation will be on Wednesday 16th June, in the morning and we are having a morning and an afternoon graduation on Thursday 17th June for our pre-school children currently in the Daisy Room. If your wee one does not normally attend on that day, Nikki will be in touch, tomorrow, with a special invitation for them.

We will be filming all the wee presentations and having a bit of a party afterwards in nursery, to celebrate. The links to the films will be put on the Learning Journals for parents to watch and download if they wish. We are sorry that we are not able to invite our families to join in the party this year, but we have been practising our songs and have had our photos taken. and we are determined to make it special.

Children are welcome to wear their party clothes and we will hide the paints for the day! If your wee one is dressing up, it might be a good idea to send their play clothes too, as the garden and playground are not party clothes friendly!

June 3, 2021
by K. Cameron
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We’re filming our graduation!

This year we are going to celebrate our pre-schoolers graduation in Nursery. We are not able to invite parents but we will be sharing our big day with you in a wee film – the link to which will be posted in your child’s learning journal on 23rd June.

We would love you to send us a baby photo of your wee graduate – please send these to NCanavan@milngavie.e-dunbarton.sch.uk.

Covid restrictions will not stop us having fun and we are looking forward to having a bit of a party to celebrate our pre-schoolers time at nursery.

June 3, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Hazel, Theo and Sally’s Amazing Plant Sale

Last week Theo and Sally’s amazing mum – Hazel – ran a plant sale to raise money for our school orchard and outdoor areas. Hazel is on our school’s Sustainability Committee. Theo, Sally and Hazel grew a great many of the plants themselves from seed, and also asked friends to grow some for us too. They also received donations from other school and nursery parents who handed plants in to the orchard. On the day there was a fantastic selection of plants to choose from. The plants were very well watered as the heavens opened for nearly the whole afternoon,

The rain did not put off the hardy customers.

The vegetable stall was very popular

The tomato plants were on sale in the polytunnel

The plants were very well watered

Hazel-our wonderful plant sale organiser! 🌟

Sally, putting the signs up for the big event!

Beautiful signs made by Theo and Sally were great advertising!

Sally and Theo had also been involved in making the signs and donation boxes for the Plant Sale and these were beautifully written and very creatively decorated and designed. They had also sown their own seeds and labelled them. The whole family were involved in planning and organising this wonderful fundraising event and hours of gardening, sign writing and organising, not to mention transporting all the plants, went into the venture.

Look at these wonderful donation boxes

Hazel, Theo and Sally raised an absolutely amazing £314 for the school and nursery. We would like to say a very loud and public THANK YOU! for all their hard work. This money will be used to buy compost and plants for our outdoor areas, in both the school playgrounds and the orchard. We are very keen to grow crops that the children can see grow, and then taste when ready to harvest.

May 12, 2021
by Ms C McMenemy
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NEW Family Learning online

Julie Bannerman is our Family Champion at Milngavie EYC. She has recently been trained in delivering an exciting program of support and information for families. Click on the purple “Go to this Sway” link for more information

Go to this Sway

May 12, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Date for the Diary-Big Orchard Bring and Buy Plant Sale 24th May and Gardening Day this Sunday!

One of our amazing nursery mums- Hazel Cropper – has very kindly organised a Plant Sale in the Orchard, on 24th May between 2.30pm and 4pm. She has been growing plants for us and we are going to sell them to raise funds for outdoor projects around the school and orchard. If you have any plants you could divide in your garden to create some plants for the sale, we would be so grateful to have them.

Our outdoor areas are currently not maintained at all by the council. Covid restrictions and lockdown have meant that we have not been able to fund raise at all. If you come along and bring and buy some plants, you will be contributing tremendously to helping us, as we work towards creating amazing outdoor areas throughout our school grounds.

Family Gardening Day – 16th May 2021 – 1pm to 3pm in the orchard.

Everyone is very welcome at our gardening day in the orchard on Sunday. There will be jobs for all strengths and abilities and families are welcome, as long as children stay near to their own parents. If you have any plant donations they will be very gratefully received! Can volunteers bring their own tools, and if you can bring a wheel barrow too that would be fantastic! You are welcome to bring a picnic and have it in the orchard. Fingers and toes crossed for a lovely day1 Our orchard is beginning to look wonderful and it is great to see all the plants which our wonderful volunteers have donated and planted, starting to bloom and fill out the beds. Thanks to everyone for making it such a special space for our children.

May 12, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Our Orchard Thinglink – Explore at home

This week our pre-school children have been planting sunflowers and exploring compost. We have been using the following Thinglink of our orchard on our interactive whiteboard with the children. They might like to explore it with you and show you some of the things we are learning about. Click the link to access our orchard thinglink.

https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1448557108378206210

May 10, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Monday Morning News

Our Pre-school Active Learning Project starts this week

This morning our pre-school children started on their Active Learning Project – something we usually do with Primary 1. Its a bit different this year as we are going to have to share our learning online. For the next 4 weeks we will be looking at some interesting lifecycles – we started today with Sunflowers.

Two groups of pre-school children became scientists this morning. As we were going to do planting, we looked very carefully at compost and thought of all the different words we use for the stuff we grow plants in. We came up with soil, earth, dirt, muck and compost – a great list. We talked about what it was made up of and we looked at it very carefully using magnifying glasses. Compost/earth is magical stuff – full of bacteria and microscopic creatures – just too small to see. We tried with magnifying glasses. We are going to watch a youtube film to see a microscopic view of compost. If you would like to watch this click this link: https://video.link/w/lGotc

We looked at the compost under a magnifying glass and felt the texture with our fingers.

We talked about how all the wee creatures and beasties eat through all the dead leaves and dead creatures in that fall onto the ground and poo these out, making the soil really good for plants. We thought about how plants eat and drink and Finn and Euan told us that they use their roots. We talked about being careful not to get soil in your mouth and that we need to be very careful to wash your hands after working with soil so we don’t get bugs in our tummies. We planted sunflower seeds in our compost and watered them. We are looking forward to watching our flowers growing!

We planted the seeds 1.5 cm deep. We hope that our flowers might grow to 2m tall!

The Blueberry Group looking at their compost

We learned that sunflowers give us sunflower oil and also seeds we can eat as well as plant!

We all watered our seed pots well. We hope they will germinate soon.

Our other groups will be doing this on Thursday and Primary 1 are working on it over the course of the week. Details of your child’s learning will be put on their Learning Journal and we are also going to share pictures and videos of our learning with Primary 1. If any parent has any objection to us sharing photos and videos of their child internally within our school please let us know.

A Plea for Prompt Pick Ups

Please could we ask parents to be prompt in their collection of their child. Our wee people can become upset if they feel they are waiting, particularly if other children are starting their lunches or snack. We also have members of staff finishing their shifts at 12 and 5pm. They can be delayed if there are still little ones waiting to be collected. Of course, we appreciate that there may be times when you are unavoidably late. If you call us to let us know you have been held up , we can accommodate this. We completely understand that life is not always predictable. However, we ask for your cooperation by being here at your child’s collection time. It makes a real difference to your child’s nursery experience and also to the smooth running of our centre.

April 29, 2021
by K. Cameron
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Learning-Our Early Level Curriculum

In Scotland our National curriculum for Education – The Curriculum for Excellence -spans the ages of 3-18. At present, our children are entitled to a free nursery place from the age of 3, and so children in Milngavie Early Years Centre are aged 3, 4 and 5. We work on the Early Level of the Curriculum.

The Early Level spans 3 years of education – 2 nursery years and all of Primary 1. Mapping out our children’s educational progress is done by comparing their experiences and abilities with the “Experiences and Outcomes” of the Early Level. There are 8 curricular areas:

Expressive arts.
Health and wellbeing.
Languages.
Mathematics.
Religious and moral education.
Sciences.
Social studies.
Technologies.

Each area has it’s own Experiences and Outcomes and we work towards these through play-based learning. Young children learn best when allowed to follow their interests and learn in the context of their play. It is our job to make learning exciting and memorable and we do this by observing our children’s interests and reflecting them in the environment we set up. Trying new and exciting things is highly encouraged, and our skilled staff are trained to interact in a way that is supportive, but that encourages independence and resilience. We have a strong ethos of nurture at Milngavie EYC- the building of the fundamental self confidence needed to learn is recognised as key. We work hard to make sure all our children settle and feel secure and happy and this facilitates their confidence to learn.

Parents have a huge role to play in the learning their child experiences in nursery. By informing the nursery of your child’s preferences, their interests and what makes them happy, we can help your child settle quickly and tailor the learning to their interests. By feeding back to us, either in comments on your child’s learning journal, or even just at pick up or drop off about how your child feels about things they are learning, or giving suggestions for new learning by telling us what they are loving doing at home really helps us in our aim to Get It Right For Every Child.

The following links will take you to the documents we use for the Early Level – The Experiences and Outcomes, and The Benchmarks. The benchmarks are a more detailed exploration of the route we take to achieving the Experiences and Outcomes – a breakdown of the skills involved. We use these to map our children’s progress. When reading them, please bear in mind that we aim to achieve this level by the start of Primary 2. It is a three year journey.

Experiences and Outcomes:

https://www.edubuzz.org/curriculumforexcellence/planning-support/interdisciplinary-learning/outcomes-and-experiences-at-a-glance/

https://education.gov.scot/documents/All-experiencesoutcomes18.pdf

Benchmarks:

https://education.gov.scot/nih/Documents/EarlyLevelBenchmarksAllAreas_.pdf

Should you have any questions about the curriculum – how it is delivered in our centre or how it relates to your wee one, please feel free to speak to Kate Cameron, our Nursery Teacher. You can phone her at nursery – 0141-955-2251 or email her at KCameron@milngavie.e-dunbarton.sch.uk.