Milngavie Early Years Centre

In the water tray today there was a bit of potion making going on!  The children were bubbling up the water by blowing through special, big straws.  Angela has been buying vinegar and bicarbonate of soda and is planning something spectacular for tomorrow.  I spent a bit of the morning trying to source some dry ice for another of Angela’s spectacular science spells, but trawling the internet and phoning chemistry departments of local high schools proved fruitless.  If anyone knows where we could get a wee bit of dry ice, please let us know!

We had a lovely day in nursery today surrounded by the smell of delicious pancakes.  Katie kindly lent us an amazing electric pancake pan and we had good fun mixing up the batter.  Maureen and Kate cooked it on the pan and the results were fantastic! We even had a story about pancakes today – if you  have never read it,’Mr Wolf’s Pancakes’, by Jan Fearnley is a great book!  It has a shocking ending where Mr Wolf’s rude and nasty neighbours meet an unhappy end – no more than they deserve!!  The children loved it!

Here are some photos of our pancake making and eating!!

The Castle’s handy Scriptorium – just the place for putting a quill pen to a scroll!

Sending a letter to the king!

Princesses in the hall!

Queens in the reading corner!

Our Castle is decorated with shields and swords. It has stairs that lead up to the tower and a little window!

It’s all a bit ‘Game of Thrones’ in the Imaginative Area-(minus the inappropriate bits of course!) Lots of Kings and Queens and even a dragon costume.  There has been lots of interest in potions in the water tray – so much so that Angela is investigating potions which will foam and froth!  She also mentioned Red velvet cake. Red velvet cake involves bicarbonate of soda and a bit of frothy seemingly -I think  I’d rather taste that than the potions!

Thanks again to Katie for the fabulous tea party we had in nursery on Friday – We raised a wonderful £289!  Amazing!

Last week, the children were really interested in all things related to castles.  Maureen and Pam created a castle with the children in the look out area and provided dressing up.  Lynn provided crown making materials in the art area and on Thursday and Friday the nursery was awash with Royalty wearing sparkly crowns.  Children also made shields and swords to decorate the castle walls.  This week we have castle dressing up out and a scriptorium where scrolls can be written using feather pens.  Photos to follow later today!

We are continuing our Julia Donaldson Book month and all groups will investigate another book this week.  Again we are looking at rhyme and playing a circle time rhyme game at group time.  Our words for this week are ‘Deafening’, (particularly appropriate with the racket there sometimes is, in our nursery!) ‘Creature, Feast and Manners’.

We will also be talking about Dinosaurs with the children this week in anticipation of our Dinosaur Encounter next Tuesday.

Monday – Football – SFA Coaching sessions

Tuesday – Pancake Day – Maureen making pancakes- yum!

Gym Day for the Orange, Blue and half of the Green Groups.

Friday  – Snappy Sounds – Susan and her animal friends will be visiting us for some music making and fun!

Next week – Dinosaur Encounter on Tuesday 10-10.40am

Many, many thanks to Katie Risk for doing an amazing amount of delicious baking and for running a first rate tea room for us.  She, Rosie and Annie – her two lovely girls – had baked an amazing variety of scones, traybakes and spectacular cakes.  She provided all the lovely china on our tables and brought the coffee and tea too.  She worked solidly all morning serving the teas and coffees to all our customers and then had to go off to work in the afternoon- returning at the end of the day to collect all her crockery, coffee machines etc etc.  Thanks to Katie we made an absolutely fabulous £289- an amazing amount. When you add this to Katie’s Christmas Gin Hamper Raffle proceeds of £395, this adds up to a whopping £684 total that Katie has raised to buy a new playhouse for the garden. We are very excited at the prospect of a brand new wooden building to replace our very loved wee wooden house, which was terribly damaged by vandals.  Katie Risk – you are a complete legend!!!!

Our tea room was very popular – thanks to all our lovely customers!  Thanks too, to all the generous souls who made donations to support the event because they could not come on the day.  We really are thrilled with the amount raised!

Thanks to Lauren and her mum, Catriona – who made lovely marshmallow and chocolate cakes in special cake boxes.  Also to Salvana, Leo’s mum who baked a lovely banana loaf for us!

Here are some snapshots of the great day!

Oliver’s mum- Julie- made us an enormous tray of delicious cup cakes!

We are on the scrounge again – this time Elisabeth is going to create a sensory technology display for the children to explore and is looking for old light switches, hinges, locks, clock mechanisms, old telephone dials bolts, padlocks etc.  If you are going to being throwing anything out – please could you throw it our way!!!  We would be very grateful!

Also we are looking for hand wash bottles – Lynn is going to put our paint in them so the children can easily mix their own colours for their artistic creations!

Many thanks!

Murray and Oliver came in to nursery with great news yesterday – both their brothers were going on a visit to see Roman artefacts.  Murray’s brother Ross had made a Roman sword and Murray had decided he would make one too.  He brought it in and everyone immediately wanted to make one!  We put lots of patterns on them – Lily’s was especially colourful.  Coen made a fabulous green one “I’m concentrating hard!” he said as he coloured it in! We learned vocabulary associated with swords – blade – hilt and handle-something we had not been expecting to learn, but lots of fun!

Aliens love Undepants

Elmer

Christie and Chloe, our NC Students, putting up their lovely Elmer display.

This month we are focussing on literacy, with our Author of the month and taking time to enjoy lots of books in Nursery.  Lynn investigated the Aliens Love Underpants story with the children and they made lots of fancy underpants and aliens.  Murray made the alien spacecraft with Maureen and Lynn put it all together in a lovely display.  Our NC students made patchwork elephants after reading Elmer to the children and they too have made a great Elmer wall – come and see the art area in the Creativity Zone – it is looking super-fab!

Aaron’s mum, Jan- a woman with a keen nose for a bargain and a fabulous talent for creative baking, has fund-raised single handedly, by making beautiful bouquets of cupcakes, and has booked an amazing experience for our nursery.

On Tuesday 7th March between 10 and 10.40 am we are going to have a Dinosaur Encounter, with a huge 8 foot high, 12 foot long Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Not only is it coming to visit us in it’s very own trailer but we are going to learn a lot about dinosaurs during it’s visit.  It looks absolutely awesome and we can’t wait to meet it- though some of the staff might need a hand to hold, in case it’s scary!

As it is so big we are going to meet him in the Infant Gym and have asked our Primary 1 friends to join us.

Many, many thanks to Jan and Aaron- what a great surprise!

Check it out at http://minizoo.org.uk/dinosaur-encounters/dinosaur-encounter-education/

It’s a rainy, Monday morning but we aren’t letting it dampen our spirits – we’ve got a fun week planned in Nursery and we are ready to enjoy it.   On Monday we have our SFA football coaching sessions- we haven’t practised diving or remonstrating with the ref yet – maybe that will be today!

Tomorrow, Tuesday is gym day for the Red, Yellow and Green Groups.

Friday is our big event of the week – Our Nursery Tea Party!!  If you would like to come please sign up for a time in the nursery hall – you can pay in advance or on the day.  The cost is £1.50 and all proceeds go towards buying a new wooden playhouse for the garden.

This week in Nursery we are beginning to look at books by our Author of the Month – Julia Donaldson.  We are looking particularly at rhyming in her stories and also how the illustrator of the book helps make the story more special for us.  We are also going to be looking at some words from Julia Donaldson books this week, and learning the meanings.  This week’s words are:  Cookery Book, Weave, Patience and Extraordinary.

Here’s to another extraordinary week at Milngavie Nursery!!!