Milngavie Early Years Centre

MILNGAVIE NURSERY AND PRIMARY ORCHARD PROJECT

Our Basic Vision- achievable with £8,000

To transform waste ground and create something unique and individual which provides almost unlimited outdoor learning experiences- full of fruit trees and bushes.  To provide a natural, safe, outdoor environment for our children to play and learn in- a space which can help our upper school children to achieve their John Muir award.

Encouraging  Biodiversity –achievable with £10,000

With the additional £2K instead of the fruit trees we see in the shops, we can put in heritage, West Coast of Scotland varieties of trees and bushes to show the children that not all apples are round and red.  A poly tunnel will help us protect plants from the worst of  weather and allow us to grow even in a cold summer.  We will also be able to afford an orchard expert to provide class workshops so the pupils are involved in the process of choosing the correct plants for our space.  We will even be able to provide the habitat for 5 hives of honey bees and bird, bat and hedgehog houses.

Bringing the community along with us  –achievable with £12,000

The final £2k allows us to make this a welcoming space for the community- with a welcoming gate,an avenue of beautiful  espalier  fruit trees , benches for picnics and botanical signage throughout.  We will also put in an awning and decking area to fully connect the learning from the garden, the nursery and the orchard.  The final piece of funding would allow us to purchase an apple press and pruning equipment to enjoy harvest and maintain it for years to come.

PLEASE VOTE FOR US AND ASK EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VISIT TESCO AND GIVE US THEIR VOTE!  MANY THANKS!

Our project is being voted on in Tesco stores in Milngavie, Kirkintilloch and Bishopbriggs so if you know anyone who could vote for us there, please tell them all about us!

PLEASE VOTE FOR US!

Next week, between 27^th February and 6^th of March, an important vote will be taking place in three local Tesco stores -Milngavie, Kirkintilloch and Bishopbriggs.

Tesco has teamed up with greenspace scotland to launch its Bags of Help initiative across Scotland. The scheme will see three community groups and projects awarded grants of £12,000, £10,000 and £8,000 – all raised from the 5p bag charge.

Bags of Help offers community groups and projects in each of Tesco’s regions across the UK a share of revenue generated from the five pence charge levied on single-use carrier bags.

The public will now vote in store from 27 February until 6 March on who should receive the £12,000, £10,000 and £8,000 awards.

Our project is to create an orchard in waste ground surrounding the football pitch on Hillhead Street, Milngavie.

We want to create a peaceful and productive haven for wildlife-  a space to learn in, and a beautiful place we can share with our community.  Our vision includes planting native species fruit trees and soft fruit bushes.  The fruit produced will encourage our children to eat healthily and to know where their food comes from.  It will give opportunities for the children to practise enterprise as well as giving them space to enjoy the natural world.

Our ground needs landscaping and fences as well as trees and bushes and wildflower meadow seeds.  Additional money would help us add a poly tunnel and an awning to allow us to enjoy and work in the space – even in the rain!  We would like to provide bat boxes, hedgehog houses and bird nesting boxes to encourage a wide diversity of species to visit.  The largest grant would also allow us to provide picnic benches for outdoor classes and for the community to use for picnics in the summertime.

Spread the word – every vote counts and we would love to win the top grant as we know we can put it to the best use to benefit our community.

Please visit Tesco and vote for our project -help make Milngavie an even greener and more beautiful place!

Milngavie Nursery and Primary Orchard Project

We have some children in nursery who are particularly interested in numbers.  This morning Maureen sat with 3 of them and showed them how to use blocks to add numbers.  They picked it up very quickly and it was amazing to watch these wee, tiny people sitting on the mat and romping through a page of sums, loving every minute of it.

Pictures to follow – computer is still uncooperative!

This morning we practised our cutting and writing skills at homebase time using our very strong fingers that we have been exercising all week!  Colouring-in has always been a forbidden activity at nursery as it was argued that it stifled creativity.  We have put Paw Patrol colouring in sheets in the writing area as an experiment, and it is amazing how popular they are- especially with boys!  They really help to see how pencil control and grip are developing!  Maybe with the rise in popularity of adult colouring in books, nurseries will be allowed to let children learn this skill again. 😉

Our blog is nearly a month old.  We would love you to leave your comments to help us improve it.  Our policy with photographs, so far, has been to avoid showing pictures of the children’s faces.  We would love to kn0w if this is what you want – we are aware of how careful when putting things online, but notice that some other nurseries’ blogs have pictures. We hope that we are addressing our ability to let all parents know what is going on in Nursery, which we have often struggled to do in the past. We love the immediacy of being able to post our news as it happens, however if you feel that this is too much, please let us know.  It is important for us to have a clear policy on what we can post – if you leave your comments we can make sure our policy is the right one.  Thanks, in advance, for your help with this.

This morning we thought the gym was out of action as a new whiteboard was being installed, but luckily the installation was quicker than anticipated and we managed to take our normal groups to gym.  We had great fun balancing on upturned benches – trickier than you’d think.  We tried using our fingers to move tennis balls up and down our legs as part of our finger exercises and we also practised throwing and catching.  We has such fun that we didn’t feel that we had been there for long enough when it was time to come back.  The children were really good at getting their coats and shoes changed for gym – they are really becoming very independent.  Well done everyone!

Back at the nursery the Blue and Orange groups enjoyed the peace and quiet.  Maureen had put measuring snakes and rulers out with the playdough and a crowd of wee people enjoyed making snake families in their beds, birthday cakes with candles and using number cutters to cut out the number of candles/snakes they used.  Lots of imaginative language as well as mathematical language relating to length, size and number was used.  One of our wee ones wants to make Hot Cross Buns in nursery – so if anyone has a good recipe we’d love to use it! 

It was a beautiful morning and Angela had put out the climbing frames – it was cold but we all got our coats on and enjoyed the morning sunshine.

DOCTORS’ SURGERY

Maureen was wondering if anyone has a set of old bathroom scales for the Doctors Surgery – the children want to weigh themselves.  They don’t actually have to work too well – the children will enjoy playing on them and reading the numbers.

PAM’S SCIENTIFIC ADVENTURES

Pam Cameron – our lovely HNC Student from Anniesland College.

Pam is creating a Scientific Table of Interest.  If you have anything interesting that would not be too precious to lend us- we would love to borrow it .  Pam has been helping the children with experiments on our senses.  She is creating a wall with the Superhero Senses in our Discovery Zone.  She has used a quote that we really liked on her wall-

Equipped with his 5 senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure “Science”.  Edwin Hubble

We want to make science a real adventure in Nursery.  Pam is really helping us to do so this term.

At Milngavie Primary we have a very active and supportive PTA.  They fund raise for the school and nursery and run lots of fun events for families throughout the year. The PTA funds our music specialist, Susuan Tighe of Snappy Sounds, and has bought us new resources,  i.e. climbing equipment and large scale wooden bricks.  Nursery has always been represented by parents on the PTA and we have been asked to appeal for new Nursery Parent Members.  If you would like to join, please check out the Milngavie PTA Facebook page or speak to Kate, who can provide more details.

Mud, glorious mud!

Today was the perfect day for muddy play in the garden.  Suits and Boots were compulsory and even with these on, a few of our wee treasures went home with a real Persil challenge!!  Interesting cuisine was produced in the mud kitchen and we had great fun finding muddy fir cones and jumping in some lovely muddy puddles.  Our climbing tree was popular today. as was the willow cave, where some highly imaginative boys played a game where they all had dragons and went on wild Ninja adventures.  The garden is a great place for staff to observe children’s use of language during play, watch the development of social skills and see children learning to negotiate and interest each other in what they have found or have seen.  At Milngavie Primary we are so lucky to have a really diverse and interesting outdoor area with loads of opportunities to watch wild life and many of our children (and staff) say it is the best area in our Nursery.  Weather like today’s allows us to enjoy it to the full.

Outdoors today enjoying the sunshine!  We set up the targets and learned how to fill up the water pistols and water blasters.  The water pistols could shoot water quite far but the pressure of the water wasn’t enough to knock over the targets, so they were not really any better than the syringes we used last week.  The waterblasters worked very well- the children were able to knock over all the bottles with just 1 refill from the bucket!