Milngavie Early Years Centre

This morning before any of the children came in, our nursery was a place of tranquility and calm!  Looking round I noticed that Lynn and Maureen had set their areas up already and the room looked so inviting I had to put some photos on the blog.  Every day we try to create, “Invitations to Play”- activities that look exciting and make children want to come in and get busy.  We are lucky to have staff who take such a pride in creating a stimulating environment and I am always in awe of their skill.  We all have different talents and it is great to be able to celebrate them!!

Dawn, our lovely organiser of the Best Nursery Night Ever, has asked us to remind everyone about it – 8pm in the Fraser Centre, £5 a ticket, BYOB!  She has asked if raffle prizes could be handed in by Friday Lunchtime so we can be all organised for the evening.  She has also asked if everyone could bring lots of change!  It will be a great night – why not bring your granny, aunties, cousins and friends.  If you are a parent who is new to nursery, it’s a great way of getting know all the other nursery mums, in more relaxed surroundings than the nursery hall.  Looking forward to seeing you there!!!!!!!

 This afternoon the pm crew of the Fiery Parrot made some more delicious frozen banana lollies.  We had to do some number work to find out how many we should make.  We counted the number of pirates in each crew – our preschoolers found the number sticker and we stuck it down to make a great big sum. Kate helped us to add this up and we then knew how many we should make.

 33 in the morning and 36 this afternoon!!! Quite a lot!

We even managed to have a camp fire this afternoon and roast some marshmallows!  Yum!

The Black Pearl Crew were the Pirate mathematicians at the coconut shy this week.  They were so good at knocking down the coconuts that number 10 nut split open.  They were very interested to see what was inside and Lauren let them all taste the coconut milk and the white coconut.

 Ms Coleman’s amazing dressing up box was thoroughly enjoyed by those writing a Pirate Story this week. We are looking forward to next week when we can all dress up together.

Making the den was rather hot work today and it was nice to enjoy a cool seat inside and listen to a pirate tale once we had finished.  We realised that pirates probably built shelters for shade as well as to keep dry.

Another week of fun and active learning!  We are finishing up our project with a big Pirate Party next week!

This week was the turn of the crew of the Fiery Parrot to make the pirate provisions.  Today we were lucky, a crate of nice bananas had washed up on the shore of the desert island with some lovely bars of Tesco chocolate and a jar of sprinkles.  We cut the bananas in half and froze them with the sticks in.  The children broke up the chocolate and we melted it in a bowl.  When the bananas were solid we dipped them in the melted chocolate and sprinkled them quickly before the chocolate set.  They were absolutely delicious!  All the pirate crews enjoyed them – apart, of course, for the scurvy wee pirates that don’t like bananas!  Lucas reckoned that “We are definitely the goodest cooks!”  We didn’t manage the fire this week as we had the toothbrush inspection lady in the nursery this morning and as she had to watch all the ladies supervising toothbrushing, this took longer than we had expected.  (We all passed with flying colours – even Kate!)

Next week is our big Pirate Party – all Primary 1 children and Nursery pre-school children are invited and the ante-pre-school children in our morning session are coming too.  Children are welcome to dress up as pirates, if they want to, and we are going to have Treasure Hunts, tug o’war competitions,  toasted marshmallows and lots of other piratey games and fun.  Our afternoon pre-schoolers are welcome to come and join us 9.15-10.30 too!  Fingers crossed for a really nice morning!

 Amelia and McKenna used their writing skills this morning to create a great sign for the Classroom, Angela has created in the imaginative area.  By creating an area where the children can take their experiences of school so far, and allow them to project and share their knowledge in imaginative roleplay, we can help build their security and confidence for starting school.  Please feel free to visit the “Classroom” and let your child show you round.  It is amazing what they already know about school.

The hot weather has really made the garden grow.  We spotted strawberries in the cold frame today that just need to ripen now.  We are having to water our seedlings as they dry out very quickly in the heat.  The willow tunnel has grown lovely shady leaves, making it a cool place to play.  Our tadpoles are also growing – they are more frog shaped now and some of them are beginning to grow legs!  (Picture to follow – Kate was not quick enough to catch one today.)  We are beginning to see signs of spring turning to summer in the beautiful weather we are having.  Outdoor learning is a great way of explaining the seasons to our children and they are able to watch the changes taking place as they play.

This morning we discovered Sticky Willow, more commonly known in Milngavie as  Sticky Willie,  in our garden.  Euan and Sonny had great fun putting tails on the staff when they weren’t looking and laughing uproariously as we walked about wearing them.  We looked at the plant – it is sticky in the way that velcro is sticky.  We are going to investigate it further!

Over the last two weeks, Julie has introduced lots of different textured materials to make things with in the garden.  We have used up out-of-date rice, shredded wheat and porridge and the children have really enjoyed experimenting with adding water and working the materials with their hands.  These have been very popular activities and the use of descriptive language involved in the play has been amazing.  Today was shredded wheat.  Ailsa and Amelia worked together adding water and making a lovely sticky ball.  Lots of culinary vocabulary was used and we are sure these two are possible contenders for Master Chef at some time in the future.

  This is their amazingly delicious looking, tuna spicy ball.  “The yellow bits are what makes it spicy” said Amelia. We all pretended to eat it and it was the best tuna spicy ball we had ever pretended to taste!

This morning Maureen put snakes into the sand and attached a measuring tape and rulers to the side of the tray for the children to explore.  They were interested in the numbers and quickly got the concept of measuring to see how long the snakes were.  Later on in the morning they took measuring tapes outside and measured a lot of outdoor finds – getting real worms to stay still to be measured without stretching and hurting them is a tricky business!