Milngavie Early Years Centre

Ceud Mile Failte!  It’s Scottish week in Nursery this week and we are making saltires, singing Scottish songs and making and wearing the tartan!  It’s time to dust off the Proclaimers cd and the Jimmy Shand albums and do a bit of dancing.  We will be making Scottish flags and printing our own tartans this week and Maureen is the Nick Nairn of Nursery this week with her Scottish Snack creations.  We are going to watch a wee video animation of Tam O’Shanter as an introduction to our national bard and learn some Scottish words.  We are hoping to increase our Scottish vocabulary and would love it if you could write down your family’s favourite Scottish word and send it in to Nursery.  We are going to make a Scottish word book for our library.

On Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon we have Enjoyaball sessions and our PATHS lesson is Wee Person of the Week – each week one of the children in each group will be chosen to be Wee Person of the Week – they will help their keyworker and be their group’s special person for the week.  Each child will have a turn of this and it is designed to encourage knowledge of turn taking and boost self esteem.

On Thursday we will open up the 1st door of our Nursery Advent Calendars that Angela has been making with the children over the last week.  Wait till you see what is inside the doors!! AMAZING!

Looking forward to a braw week for a’!

Scott and his friend Rosie really enjoyed a bucket activity Lynn organised in the water tray last week.  Maureen followed it up this week, with buckets on pulleys.  It was good fun and the children spent ages filling the buckets up with different items and pulling them up to the top with the rope.  There was lots of great chat about weight and capacity with buckets sorted into tiny, medium and gi-normous!  The water tray is a great place for exploring early maths concepts and is great for stimulating mathematical vocabulary. 

We’ve been practising our dancing this week – we have our own version of an eightsome reel- its good fun and it helps us practise our counting too!  We’ll be doing our dancing again on Wednesday of next week for St Andrew’s Day.  If your wee one has anything tartan, they might like to wear it on Wednesday for our special Scottish celebration.

A wee plea from the Orchard Project

The weather has turned nice and wintry – perfect for planting 35 heritage fruit trees to make our amazing site into a real orchard. We’ll also be creating a rainbow raspberry bed with autumn fruiting raspberry bushes of different colours and building our new storage shed. Please come along and help us in our last big work day of this year. This will be the most exciting one yet, as our site becomes an orchard – and we need as many volunteers as possible. There will be coffee and tea and homebaking to keep the workers warm- we really hope to see you there! SUNDAY 4TH DECEMBER 12-4PM

Frosty cobwebs helped us see how the spiders had made them!

Spiders had made their webs on our playground gates.

Look at that!

There was ice underneath the tarpaulin on our table- it was super hard!

Now that the cold weather is with us, please, please, please could children bring gloves, scarves and hats to nursery- with their name written on somewhere!  The cloakroom is always a bit chaotic but in winter time, with boots and winter clothes it is worse and if things are not labelled they go walk about!  A good tip for keeping hold of gloves is to sew them on a piece of elastic on thread it through the arms of your child’s coat! It saves lots of time looking for them!  Also – mittens are easier for our children than gloves, something to bear in mind when buying new ones for nursery!  Outdoor play in winter is particularly important for children.  We see so little of the daylight in winter, we need to make the most of it.  As long as we are dressed warmly enough, there is no reason not to play out.  There are less germs out in the fresh air than in a superheated nursery.  Winter has its own beauty and there is always lots to learn outdoors.  Our children never stay still for long so there is little danger of hypothermia – it’s just the staff you will find frozen to the playground at the end of each day!  Fortunately, they can usually be revived with a hot cup of tea!

Ian also gave the jumping a go and then……..

Connie jumped all around the playground in her sack

We knew we could put stuff in them but the children were keen to think of other uses.  Connie and Ian climbed inside theirs and had a sack race round the playground.   Ian then had another think and look what he came up with!  Brilliant!

“I think this would be good!” he said.

“A sleeping bag!” What a good idea!

On Tuesday Murray was having a very creative time in the construction area – just look at what he managed to build by incorporating our Ikea storage unit into his design.  A real Millennium Falcon that he could pilot himself!!

It really looks as if he is flying above the planet surface and he even has built the controls for the blasters.  Genius!

We are all ready for another fun packed week at nursery.  We are practising our Christmas songs now as our concert is only 2 weeks away – on Tuesday 6th December, and the weather has turned decidedly wintery!  Next week we are having a week of Scottish culture and so, this week we are learning a Scottish Dance to do on St Andrew’s Day – next Wednesday!

On Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon, we have Enjoyaball and our PATHS session which this week is about Wee Person of the Week.  Each child will have a chance to be the special group helper and wear a special badge.

On Friday we are looking forward to seeing Susan and Mr Snappy and enjoying another fun Snappy Sounds music workshop.

On Friday, it was time to test all the ice cream Angela and the children had worked so hard to make last week.  We tried the ice cream blind folded to see if we could tell what all the different flavours were without looking.  It was really interesting- it wasn’t always easy to tell.  Once we had tasted the ice creams we had to vote for which flavour we thought was best.  We made a graph which shows who liked what!  From the graph we can see that the clear winner – a real surprise to staff – was the Mint Chocolate Chip flavour.  The verdict on all the ice creams was that they were DELICIOUS!

Here are some of the pictures of our fabulous Children in Need Day!  Everyone got into the spirit of the event and came to Nursery in their jammies – children, students and staff – and we all had a brilliant day.   Milngavie Primary was one of the very first donors to be mentioned on the telly – thanks to everyone for their donations to a good cause!         

Eileen – a keen fan of pinterest – came up with a very different way to make marks and paint outdoors today.  She put poster paint into polypockets and taped them to the table.  She asked the children what colours they wanted to try.  The children quickly found out that light colours seemed to work better than the dark ones, so we tried putting white paper under the polypockets.  This helped a bit with the darker colours, but it didn’t work at all well with the white paint.  We then tried bright blue paper underneath and this was pretty effective.  The paint felt quite squidgy through the plastic. It was fun writing and drawing on the plastic with our fingers and then smooshing the paint with our hands to rub out all the things we had done, to start all over again!