Milngavie Early Years Centre

We came back to Nursery to a lovely surprise! The hyacinth bulbs that the PTA gave us to plant in our welly planters have bloomed beautifully over the holidays.  “They smell really nice!” said Sonny.

We enjoyed a great first day back, out in the nursery garden.  There is lots of frog spawn in the pond and the daffodils are in bloom.  There was lots of lovely role play in the Willow Den and in the afternoon

Robyn, McKenna, Sonny and Jamie worked hard as a team, pushing tyres up the boardwalk and racing them down again.

  “This is exhausting!” commented McKenna – but they all agreed it was worth the effort and was great fun!

Today we welcomed Emily, Anna, Eddie, Joseph and Ian to nursery.  They all settled in very quickly and left, promising to come back which is always a good sign!

Ava celebrated her 5th birthday in nursery and told us about her amazing trip to Florida during the holidays.  We heard lots of other exciting things that people had been up to, and we are looking forward to drawing them later in the week.

Miss Murphy came over to tell us about the very exciting time she had in China, finding out about what Chinese children do at school- she brought the Nursery ladies all a set of lovely chopsticks to add a touch of  oriental sophistication to the staffroom at lunchtime!

Welcome to a new term at Milngavie Nursery.  We are looking forward to an exciting first week, welcoming our new children and their families, meeting up with our friends and talking, in our groups, about our holiday experiences.  We are looking forward to seeing how Spring has changed our garden and having a look in our pond to see what has happened to the frogspawn.  Will both Otto and Spotty, our nursery goldfish have made it through the holidays or will we be discussing the possibilities of a fishy afterlife?  The beginning of a new term is always exciting!

In this term our pre-school children will be visiting their Primary One classrooms and getting ready for the big adventure of school.  They will also be taking part in an Outdoor Active Learning Project with Primary 1.  This year’s theme is PIRATES!! -Always popular with Nursery staff who love donning an eye patch and a dodgy pirate accent in the name of education!

This week we are going to be drawing something we enjoyed in the holidays to put in our Learning Journeys.  The skill we are working on this week is encouraging a good pencil grip- essential for handwriting later on, as it really helps with pencil control.

Tuesday is Gym Day for the Red, Yellow and Green Groups.

Over the next few weeks we will be revisiting our Nursery Charter, looking at the rules we chose at the beginning of the year and thinking about whether they are still important.  We are going to meet up with Twiggle the Turtle in our PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Skills) sessions and talk about how we make friends and also, how we keep friends- even when we disagree with each other.   We are also looking forward to finding out a bit more about Milngavie, with some more trips in the local area.

 In the garden today,just beside the pond the children found some very slimy piles of frogs eggs! We don’t know why the frogs chose to lay it on the ground instead of in the pond, but are going to do a bit of research on google tomorrow with the children. Elisabeth managed to scoop up the eggs and put them carefully in the pond. We are going to watch the pond very carefully and see what happens to them over the next 3 months!

Last week Marcus asked if we could maybe have a dinosaur dig in our garden – he felt sure that we would find something very exciting if we looked very carefully.

This afternoon Elisabeth had a very exciting project for us.  She had come by an ancient map of the garden, with some dinosaurs pictured on it.  She thought that if we used the map we might unearth something special.  We were all really excited.

Here we are heading out for an adventure

We got organised with spades and brushes and looked carefully at the map.  We found the first spot with dinosaurs, near the arch.  We dug for a bit then someone spotted a white thing in the ground.

It was a huge bone – Wow!

By the time we had finished digging in all the places on the map we had a huge pile of huge bones!  We thought we had probably found a whole dinosaurs leg!   We wondered how it had died.  We are going to think about that tomorrow.  We will let you know what our ideas are!  Digging is very hard work – we were all ready for snack, after we had washed our hands. of course!

This afternoon a group of children went down to the village with Maureen and Annabel, to draw an important village landmark – The Clock!  We took clipboards and pens.  There were lots of details to draw and it took us quite a while.

We made a fabulous job of recording what we saw- just look at our amazing pictures!

We are going to make a model of the clock tomorrow – it will give us a chance to find out and learn a bit about Roman Numerals.

After drawing the clock we took Annabel on a tour of some of the Milngavie landmarks we have been learning about.  She saw Gavin’s mill, Tesco and the Fish Ladder and, of course, the playpark before we went back to Nursery.

  When we went out to explore the village , we took a picture of Colpi’s.

Stewart said:

Sam noticed the writing on the window and especially noticed the numbers -1928.  Maureen told Sam that her mummy had been born in 1928- 88 years ago.  “Your mummy was born in the Ice Cream Shop?” Sam asked.  Maureen had to explain that her mummy had been born in the same year that the Ice Cream shop had first opened – not actually in the shop itself!

Sam then made a fabulous model of Colpi’s for our village learning wall.  Isn’t it amazing that the inhabitants of Milngavie have been enjoying Colpi’s Italian Ice Cream for 88 years?

Sam’s amazing model complete with writing on the windows, including EST 1928!!

This afternoon a group of children are going to the village with their clipboards to make a special drawing of the clock in the precinct.  Watch this space to see what they come back with.

 Angela- keyworker with our Yellow Group- was getting right Springy with her lovely nesting bird hair adornment.  She managed to forget she was wearing it and wore it all day!  We think it really suits her!!!  Maybe the reason Angela is so at one with nature was the inspiration she got at the Forest Nursery course last week.  On the In-Service Day in May, Angela is taking the staff team down to the woods to show them how to organise, set up and run a Forest Play session- we are all really looking forward to it!

The children have been busy in the art area today recreating some of our local landmarks.  We printed with paint and bricks to make Gavin’s Mill and Greta found some great sticks in the garden to make the wheel.

We took pictures on our walk of local  shops so we could make paintings of the signs in Nursery.  Look at this amazing sign writing.  Murray was very quick to spot that the photograph showed Boots the Chemist – where his mummy works!!!  Please come in and see the wall as we put up all the places we visited and read our comments about what we learned!