Milngavie Early Years Centre

Wow!  It’s still sunny!  We are going to be making the most of it today with lots of outdoor learning.  Maureen is investigating the length of snakes in the sand tray and Angela is creating a School Classroom complete with uniforms, reading books etc, in the imaginative area.  Valerie is encouraging our pre-schoolers to create a masterpiece to take with them to put on the wall in Primary 1.

Tuesday is gym day for the Blue and Orange Groups.  Our Milngavie pre-schoolers are visiting school again this afternoon at 1.10pm.  Parents do not need to stay this week!

Wednesday is Pirate Day – Ahar!  The ship’s cooks will be making cool banana lollies!

Friday is the Big Nursery Night Out!  If you haven’t yet bought your tickets there is still time!  Bring your mates – it will be fab.  8pm at the Fraser Centre.

 This afternoon Maureen and Kate took some wee explorers out to scope out the land our new orchard will be planted on.  There was lots of long grass- it was a bit like being on a bear hunt! We looked at where it would be good to put some apple and pear trees and maybe a few fruit bushes.  We explored the back of the plot, under the trees, where the bee hives will go and we looked at the kinds of flowers they might be able to make honey from.  There were buttercups and speedwells but not much else.  We think we will need to plant some flowers for the bees!  We found out that you could tell if someone likes butter by holding a buttercup under their chin and seeing if their chin turned yellow.  We had lots of fun with this!

It was fun to explore while the ground is very overgrown. Oliver found a protractor for measuring angles that someone must have dropped.

Work is going to begin on creating an orchard on the land in September next year, and we have taken some “before” pictures to put at the start of a book we might make about all the building of our orchard.

The ladies are particularly enthusiastic about the apple press that we might buy for the creation of apple juice from our own homegrown apples. I wonder why!?

Please, please could all children have sunscreen applied before coming to Nursery.  It is really important that we are all protected and safe.  If you forget, you are welcome to put some on your child from the bottle in the Nursery Hall.  We have been finding that we have big queues of children who need suncreamed before we can go out – this is taking the staff ages, is boring for the children and lessens the time we can spend outside.  Some children are also very reluctant to let staff put it on for them and it can cause distress.

We are, of course, very happy to re-apply sunscreen to those who need it throughout the day.  Many thanks for your help with this!

Many thanks to everyone who came along to Briarlands farm with us yesterday. It was a fantastic day and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.  We asked the children this morning what their favorite things were and the bouncy pillows, the go carts and the zip slide were top of the list.  Some of our mums and dads also enjoyed the bouncy pillows! Thank you for all the great feedback.  Several of our veteran mums who have been on several  Nursery trips now, have said that it was the best trip ever!

We hope you had an amazing weekend, enjoying all the brilliant sunshine.

We’ve got an exciting week in Nursery and are all back with our batteries recharged!  Today is gym day for the Red, Yellow and Green Groups.

This afternoon – our pre-school children going to Milngavie Primary School are going for their first visit and parents are also invited to an Introduction to Milngavie Primary in the infant gym with Mrs Stillwell, the Depute Head.  If your child is in nursery all day today you are welcome to pick them up to take them over to school yourself, or alternatively they can come over with Kate and Elisabeth who will be going too.  We are to be there for 1.15pm, so if you want to pick your child up please come to nursery before 1.10pm.  We are all feeling excited and looking forward to meeting our teachers.

Wednesday is our Nursery Trip to Briarlands Farm Park.  The bus leaves at 9.15!!  Please bring sunscreen, sunhat and a packed lunch.  Fingers crossed this weather continues and we have an amazing day.

On Thursday we are going to be talking to the children about the orchard that is planned for the waste ground behind the nursery and the children will be photographing and drawing the land as it is just now.  Work will be starting in Aug/September so it is important we get the “before” pictures taken before the summer holidays.

Tickets on sale for the Big Nursery Night Out on Friday 10th June.  £5 each – honesty box in Nursery Hall!  It is going to be a great night – buy your tickets soon!

Not teddy bears having a picnic – Milngavie Nursery Staff!  Probably swinging from trees, jumping in puddles, splashing in the burn and playing hide and seek, before they get down to the serious and more sensible business of risk assessing, photographing, and planning where we might go for our Forest School Adventure.

Today is Forest School  Training for staff – Angela has been on a Forestry Commission training course on this and is ready to “cascade” to colleagues, all that she learned.  As well as this we have a DVD to watch!  Sounds like the best in-service training ever!!!

Today some of our pre-school children had the opportunity to visit the school playground at play time.  Some of them met up with big brothers and sisters, some with friends they knew last year.  It was great to see how excited they were at meeting up and how relaxed our wee ones looked, in amongst all the big schoolchildren.  We had come down to school to do a bit of exploring in the Active Learning Zone.  When the bell rang we  lined up, with all the other infant classes at the door and waited for the teachers to come and take us in to school.  When we got to the Active Learning Zone, we were quite relieved to see that there were many familiar activities, and once again we met with old friends from last year, who showed us the ropes and told us the rules. 

This was a worthwhile experience for all the children who went.  It has been arranged that all our pre-schoolers have a chance to do this in their last few weeks of nursery.  As well as our two upcoming school visits, these informal chances to play, explore and talk to current Primary 1’s will be reassuring and boost the confidence of our wee ones going to school. All of them said they really enjoyed themselves.   At the end Julie and Angela had to do a lot of persuading to get them to come back out of the classroom and go back to Nursery.  We can’t wait to go back again!

  We have heard a rumour that tomorrow just might stay dry.  If so, please can our wee pirates get their sunscreen on before coming to Nursery or school.  We are hoping for some sunshine so we can enjoy all of our activities in the garden tomorrow.  The crews will all try a different activity this week, story telling, pirate fishing and coconut shy, den making and being the cooks in the galley will all take place.  This week the cooks are preparing the grog ration for everyone and, as unfortunately no rum has washed up on our island yet, our grog ration will be fruit smoothies made from all sorts of tropical fruits, coconuts etc.  Much more healthy and it’ll stop the crews getting scurvy with all that wonderful vitamin C in it!

 Elisabeth has created a fabulous water wall for children to further explore how water moves down tubes, pulled by the force of gravity.  She and Gavin, our janitor,  made this amazing contraption which  looks a bit like the inner workings of Kate’s brain! The children were more than keen to test it out and found that the water ended up coming from tubes they weren’t expecting it to.  There were more than a few soggy wee people today, but we are confident the numbers of those ending up soaked will lessen as the children get to know the resource.  Thank you to Elisabeth for a really fun addition to our outdoor learning area!

Julie brought the art area outside today, with lots of colourful paint and got the children who had made clay models last week to paint them.  The children have really learned a lot about clay from working with it, letting it dry and painting it.  We learned today that fine clay models sometimes break when they dry and if you drop them they smash.  The children took their models home today- a really wide variety of creations, from practical bowls with names on, to painted toadstools and even a multi-coloured sea otter made by Ewan, who was very proud of it!

Ewan’s amazing sea-otter