Milngavie Early Years Centre

Sorry – no pictures – computer is on strike again!  Today in Nursery Angelina Ballerina, Buzz Lightyear, Cinderella, Matilda, Sir Scallywag, a fierce dinosaur, The Gruffalo, A beautiful Pink Unicorn, Spiderman and the Little old woman from A Squash and A Squeeze came to visit.  We enjoyed lots of amazing stories.  We discovered that books can take us to exciting  places without having to leave our chairs.   They can be happy and sad- some have pictures – some don’t.  Books are good at making us think and making us use our imaginations.

Angelina Ballerina brought her book which showed all her dance  moves and we all had a go at a bit of ballet.  Sir Scallywag brought an amazing book called Sir Scallywag and the Golden Underpants by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Korky Paul (the illustrator of the Winnie the Witch books)!  We will definitely be buying this book for Nursery – it was brilliant and it made us all laugh!

Matilda told us all about the wicked Miss Trunchbull who put the children in  her school in “chokey”.  We are very glad she doesn’t work at our nursery!

We are celebrating World Book Day in Nursery by having a Dress Up Day – dressing up as a favourite character!  This is of course an optional activity and we will be very happy to see children dressed up as themselves!  However we are dressed, we are going to have a day of sharing favourite stories and books in Nursery and celebrating the joy of reading together.

Mixing the ingredients using our fingers!

A Gingerbread Snake – that’s a first!

Yummy chocolate drops for eyes!

We drew on faces with writing icing!

Using the ingredients we bought in Tesco yesterday, the first of our gingerbread bakers worked hard to produce some absolutely delicious gingerbread men and women and snakes!  The smell in the nursery was fantastic!  Maureen will be working with more children this afternoon and tomorrow to make some more.  Kate is going to watch carefully and see how they are made so she can make some at home. Yum Yum!

Julie has been working hard in the writing area with all our wee Paw Patrol fans – encouraging writing, drawing and story telling.  It has been lovely to see so many boys enjoying being round the writing table and the chat has been wonderful.  Come on in to the Discovery Zone and see their work.

Our Paw Patrol
Writing Wall

Julie and Elisabeth also revamped the writing area – it’s looking fab!

Our new look writing area

This week in Nursery Lynn has been encouraging creativity in the art area.  She has presented the children with a wide variety of different media and subjects and look at the amazing results! Painting  or making collage skeletons gave the children a chance to talk about their bones and joints as they worked and lots of them loved the spooky aspect to this project.

Dem bones, dem bones dem dry bones!

The children’s response to spring flowers was wonderful – every child approached this differently and Lynn showed how stalks could be made by dipping paint into cardboard.  Lots of vocabulary to do with length was used and the children really enjoyed the experience.

Look at our beautiful spring flowers!

We made a great hospital display with things that we had used in our Doctors’ Surgery/Hospital!  Please come and visit our Creativity Zone and see our work up close!

This is our hospital display – wow!

We ordered a new lightbox and it arrived today!  Our first experiment was to try out transparent coloured objects to see the light shining through them.  In Reggio Emilia nurseries in Italy, light boxes are used a lot to help children appreciate the vibrancy of colour.  Paint pots are put on them to light up the colours, and they are used to create transient art works.  We are also looking forward to using ours to create shadow puppets!  We think it will be a valuable addition to our creative area and the children seem to love it already!

Our new light box is amazing!

The trip to Tesco went really well – we checked our recipe, found all our ingredients and payed for them at the till.  The lady gave us all a token and we voted for an Orchard at Milngavie Primary and Nursery.

We checked the recipe to find out the ingredients for our Ginger bread men

We got everything!

We are going to visit again later today! Voting doesn’t close till next Sunday!  Fingers and toes crossed!

This week in Nursery we are looking at dangers we might find in our houses and how we manage the risk for ourselves and our wee brothers and sisters.

We are continuing our interest in water outdoors and this week are looking at the force water can have and what we could use it for.  We are also looking for the signs of spring appearing.    The national curriculum describes these as

• I am learning to assess and manage risk, to protect myself and others, and to reduce the potential for harm when possible. HWB 0-16a
• I know and can demonstrate how to keep myself and others safe and how to respond in a range of emergency situations. HWB 0-17a

We are making gingerbread men this week and will be visiting Tesco on a regular basis to buy ingredients and to vote for our Orchard Project.

The voting boxes for the community projects are at the tills in Tesco.  PLEASE VOTE FOR US!!

Wednesday is World Book Day – we are dressing up as characters from our favourite book – this is of course, optional, and there is no pressure to do this!

The voting begins on Saturday morning and we will finally be able to see who the two other projects are!  Please, please, please vote and encourage everyone you know who uses Tesco to vote for us too!  We are not allowed to put up any promotional stuff in the store so we are going for a poster campaign in the village and as much publicity on social media as we can manage!  The Milngavie Herald even ran an article on our campaign based on our press release.

Wednesday is World Book Day and we are joining in the celebrations to help make the children aware of the joy of reading.  To make it fun, the children are welcome to come to Nursery in fancy dress, dressed as a character from a book.  This is of course, optional- feel absolutely no pressure.  We will be reading lots of great stories on Wednesday and looking at why people read books. We might even make a book about our favorite books!