Milngavie Early Years Centre

  This term we are looking at the lifecycle of butterflies.  We ordered a special tub with caterpillar eggs and when they arrived, on Monday, they were all quite tiny.  They really do get bigger and hairier by the day- a couple of them are enormous already!  We are going to watch what happens to them and hopefully be able to release some butterflies into the garden in a few weeks.

  Today we had a very, very special show and tell time.  Holly brought in her special beads – a record of her time and her treatment in hospital.  We were all amazed by the length of the string of beads.  “There are 105!” Holly told us, “and each bead means something different.  She told us the yellow beads were when she had a sleepover in hospital and she had quite a few of them.  All  the colours of the beads represented something and Holly could tell us what every colour meant-  from anti-biotics to cannulas, to changes to her wiggly – the line she gets her treatment through.  She also showed us the special bead that she got the day she found her hair on her pillow and the special anchor bead she got when she had a chest infection.

Holly describes all this so knowledgeably and cheerfully – she has an incredible knowledge of what has happened and what her medicine does.  She was happy to share her experiences with us and without wanting to sound overly slushy or sentimental – it was a beautiful experience.  Her friends were very interested and asked her loads of questions.  We overheard a conversation in the hall about the bead she got when she lost her hair- “I like short hair – I got mine cut” said Ava.  “My brothers teeth fall out,”  said Ruari- “Big ones grow in and the wee ones fall out”  “I saw all my big teeth on an x-ray in hospital” Holly told us. May told her the tooth fairy comes, if you left your teeth under your pillow and leaves you money.  The conversation then naturally moved to how much money you might get from the tooth fairy.

Holly is a very special and bright wee star.  Her courage and resilience are truly  inspirational.  She knows that she still has more beads to collect  and she has told us that when she collects more she will bring them in and tell us about them.  A huge thank you to Holly for bringing in her bead and sharing her stories, and to Kathryn, Holly’s mum for letting us share this with you.

Holly’s beautiful beads

  This morning we planted our cauliflowers, carrots and brussel sprouts into big pots with special compost.  Finn also brought us some great pots and seeds to plant- we will planting those up too on Friday.

Dawn has printed the tickets for the Big Nursery Night Out, 10th June, at the Fraser Centre.  They are in an honesty box in the Nursery Hall.  They cost £5 each.  It will be a great night – please feel free to bring friends, sisters, aunties, grannies etc etc.  Looking forward to an amazing evening!

 Today we planted our seed potatoes into a new potato bag.  We are hoping for a good crop because we watered them in very well indeed!

We were also really lucky as we had a visit from Susan, whose son Danny used to come to our nursery.  She brought us wee vegetable seedlings.  We are going to have a go at growing them in containers and will be planting them tomorrow!

  Meet Joey – he’s a wee green frog that lives in our garden pond.  Elisabeth- who is a brave sort of woman – caught him in her hand where he sat quite nicely for this photo.  He then jumped off and swam up to the other end of the pond.

We were able to have a really good look at him and count his toes and fingers.

Then he popped up and gave us all a bit of a fright – we thought he was maybe looking for a princess to kiss!

Our nursery focus this month is on ideas for healthy snack.  If you have any good ideas for easy, nutritious snacks you think we could use in Nursery – either as baking ideas or as snack – why not come along to the Focus group on Thursday 12th May at 11.30 am. in our wee meeting room.

We can promise you a healthy, or otherwise, cup of tea in exchange for your ideas.

This morning we got a new firebasket – we need to get it ready for our big Pirate Adventure, so that the pirates have somewhere to cook their food – so we opened up the flat pack and set to work.

Fred very sensibly pointed out that “The most important thing is not to lose the screws!”  He had obviously built flat packs before!!!  We looked at the bits and counted them all.  “There’s a lot of bits!” said Cate.  Max was the special “nut mechanic”.  He had the job of putting on all the nuts onto the ends of the screws and tightening them up.  “If you come to my house, you can see I have ones at home.  Mine are yellow!”  Max was very good at putting the nuts on in the right direction.

Cate helped put on the handles. The very last nut was really, really difficult.  There was something wrong with the thread and we had real trouble getting it on to the screw.  “We could use the hammer!” said Fred – but this didn’t work. “We could try this!” said Max, taking an adjustable spanner from the tool kit. “And maybe this ..” said Cate , handing me an electric screw driver.  We all worked together and found that if we held it really tight with the adjustable spanner we could get it tighter.

This learning experience showed that we have some very able builders within the nursery – it has made me think that we could provide challenge with some large scale nuts and bolts and drilled pieces of wood to attach together.  Great for problem solving and motor skills.

Lynn, our Senior Early Years Worker is a genius when it comes to making exciting new resources.  Abby’s dad brought us in two cable drums and Lynn has created wee toadstool houses for small world play, by painting them beautifully!  She also made this set of Singing Spoons- these are great for choosing songs to sing at song time and we can make more of them as we expand our repetoire.  Lynn is always thinking of new ways to add exciting resources to interest the children in our curriculum.  She was also responsible for the number logs that Rodaidh had fun with this morning.

In the garden this morning, Rodaidh came across a box of log numbers.  One was missing – he had to sequence them and find the missing number.  He did this very quickly and found out the missing number was 12!  Well done Rodaidh!