Milngavie Early Years Centre

This is a short letter to say a huge thank you to everyone for their care, support, generosity and good wishes after the house fire of 14th December which saw our home destroyed, and the loss of our beloved dog, George the Jack Russell.

The love and support shown by people has been overwhelming, and has given myself and my family a real sense of belonging.

We, as a family are moving on -work will start soon on the house and we will be forever grateful for all your help and support.

Thanks again

Valerie and Adam Fisken

After an incredibly fast week, we are at the start of a new one!  It’s going to be a good one!  At the weekend our orchard underwent another transformation – the polytunnel frame was put up and the gate from the nursery was put in.  Many thanks to all the lovely people who came along to help!

This morning we have our SFA football coaching sessions with Danny.  It’s our second last week of them and we have been playing wee games of real football.  Most people are getting the hang of using just our feet to move the ball, though there is still quite a bit of handball going on!!

On Tuesday we are having a Dinosaur Encounter with a very large dino in the school gym.  Primary 1 are joining us and we are really looking forward to hearing a lot about these amazing beasts and finding out about what they were really like.

Many thanks for all the spring cleaning donations – we are really grateful and will put them to good use.  We are still looking for empty  hand wash bottles – the ones with the wee pump in them.  We are going to use them to make a paint mixing facility in the art area!

Words of the week this week are: Outside, Furious, Somersault and Idea!!!

Our new author of the month is Valerie Thomas, who with her illustrator Korky Paul, is the creator of the amazing Winnie the Witch!

Our orchard is really taking shape – the trees are looking as if they have all taken root and have leaf buds on.  The daffodils the nursery planted are coming up and all the lavenders, honeysuckles, buddleia etc are looking super healthy.  It is going to be a beautiful place very soon.

On Sunday we have lots going on – fences to finish, a polytunnel to erect, gates to fit and compost to move.  If you have any time and could come along between 12 and 4pm on Sunday, we would be really grateful for any help you could give us.  Tea and coffee will be provided for all the workers.  Please come along – even just to see what we are up to!

Last week in nursery we had a bit of a mystery on our hands- someone had scribbled all over the Castle Scriptorium in felt pen!!  To this day, we do not know who the little graffiti artist was!  We all had a look at the shelves and decided that the scribbling was not really a good addition – in fact, a lot of the children were outraged!  “It’s a bad mess!”  “It’s all messy and I don’t like it!”  were a couple of the comments we overheard.

We talked about not writing on furniture and walls and keeping our nursery beautiful for all of us.  Some children helped the ladies get it all cleaned up and lovely again, and it has stayed that way, ever since!

Charlie had obviously been thinking it over and came to us today with some plans that he had drawn up to help catch the perpetrator, (“the baddy who wrote all over the shelves”), should it ever happen again!  He had drawn it all out carefully on a couple of bits of paper!!  Great work Charlie!

Wednesday afternoon was beautiful and we enjoyed a really good play in the afternoon.  Valerie, our outdoor play guru just now,  took the pictures below and explained what had been happening.

Findlay and Ronnie found a tiny little plant growing between the planks.  They had a theory that it was a jaggy nettle and were daring each other to touch it!!!!

Ellis enjoyed the outdoor music area and sang himself a  lovely song as he played percussion.

Holly and Connie made themselves almost invisible when they climbed up inside a tree.  They told us they were camouflaged!

There was lots of interest in tyre racing with Rosie, Dexter, Adam and Drew all competing!  Drew made a bridge across the raised beds- he was charging everyone money to pass- a real entrepreneur!

Emily mastered the art of jumping from one bench to another and Sonny practised escaping from dinosaurs by swinging on a tree!

It’s that time of year again – we are trying to plan a place to go for a Nursery Summer Trip!  If you are free next Tuesday afternoon and feel like a coffee and a chat about where we might go, please come to our Parents Focus Group at 1 pm.  We would like suggestions about where we might visit and also to chat about how we fund our trip- whether we should fund raise to subsidise the cost, or whether parents would be prepared to pay the full amount of the bus and the entry cost.

If you have suggestions and can’t come, please tell us and we’ll discuss them at the meeting. The date for the trip is Friday 2nd of June and we’ve booked buses, we now just need to tell them where we want to go!

Thursday 2nd March is World Book Day, and to celebrate it in Nursery we are hoping the children will all bring in their favourite book.  We are going to have a real read-a-thon going on in the story corner, and will see if we can read everyone’s book throughout the day.

Please could you write your child’s name very clearly on their book so we don’t lose any!  We are looking forward to seeing what the Nursery’s favourite book is.

Staff are not planning on dressing up this year, but children are welcome to, if they wish.

We are looking forward to a day of enjoying literacy and even have Alphabet Cereal for snack so we can write as we eat!

We have been working hard at listening for rhyming words in our stories recently and our Eddie brought in the best rhyming book yet!!  ‘Oi Dog!’, by Kes Gray and Clare Gray is a really funny book.  It has outrageous rhyming words – e.g. -“cheetah”, and “fajita”, “crab” and “kebab”, and Eddie’s favourite -“elephants”, and “smelly pants”.  We had great fun reading this and laughed an awful lot.  Eddie gave this book a definite 10 out of 10!