Category: Outdoor Learning

We would like to remind parents and families about suitable outdoor clothing as well as a spare set of clothes for children.

The weather hasn’t been great recently, but we still love to play and learn in our outdoor area. We do get wet from the puddles a lot although it comes with all the fun and learning!

Could you please remember about wellies, waterproof/warm jacket and a change of clothes in case we get too excited with the rain and puddles, please? Thank you!

We had a special visitor in our Early Learning and Childcare Class – Rennie the Elf! Rennie told us that he is a special elf that we can touch, cuddle and play with as Santa sent him down to play with people and children. We remember that the elves in our schools, nurseries and homes are different kinds of elves and we can’t touch them as we cannot ruin their magic!

Rennie the Elf is a special helper within Renfrewshire Council. He visits different work places and likes to help out in everyday duties and activities. He chose our Early Learning and Childcare Class as one of the places to visit during December and see what we are up to during our day! We showed Rennie around and took him with us to play away!

Keep an eye on Renfrewshire’s Facebook posts to see more photos of Rennie’s visit to our Early Learning and Childcare Class!

Who knew wooden blocks and planks of wood could be so many things?! The boys and girls have been so creative with their play, both outside and inside! We have all been working very hard together to create lots of different things using simple resources – we love your great imagination! We also absolutely love how the boys and girls have been working together, including one another in their play, exchanging ideas, problem solving and, of course, helping each other! The older boys and girls have been very kindly making sure that the younger girls and boys are alright and taking them under their wing in their play, how fantastic!

The boys and girls have built cars, slides, ramps, car parks, weights and even dens! And we all have new ideas every single day, how exciting!

P: “We’re going to build a slide.”
N: “It’s too low, it won’t slide!”
J: “You can climb on it too, but you need to be very careful.”
L: “It’s great teamwork!”
G: “I’m building a new car for my friend D and it’s going to be a surprise.”
J: “My car has got two steering wheels.
G: “Do you want to help me build it?”
M: “Musimy teraz posprzatac.”

The boys and girls have been super busy the past few days in our class! There has been lots and lots of exciting and enjoyable learning going on inside and outside… Keep reading if you’d like to see what we’ve been up to!

Some boys and girls have been talking about fairies and fairy gardens, so we decided to make our own! We found a nice quiet area in our outdoor garden and used our creativity to paint and decorate our fairy houses!

K: “This door looks like a jigsaw piece!”
N: “The doors are different shapes, I can see a square and a circle!”
J: “Look at my painting, it’s lovely.”
M: “I’m painting it red!”
R: “We’re making fairy houses and fairies might go in them.”

Another day the boys and girls decided to do some more painting outside, only in a different form! We filled up our spray bottles with different colours of paint and took it to the garden to spray our bed sheet and make it a little bit more colourful! The boys and girls not only developed their imagination but also exercised their fine motor skills by squeezing the trigger on the spray bottles. We’ve had lots and lots of fantastic conversations about their pictures and how the paint changes if we mix different colours together!

O: “Look, it’s changing colour! It’s green now!”
G: “It changes the colour when you mix the colours.”
N: “It’s tricky to press it.”
L: “I like painting on the sheet, it can go really high.”

Some of the boys and girls who have been enjoying playing in the house corner have noticed that we don’t have any bread in the baskets! They had a great idea to bake pretend bread and buns for all of us to play with. The children were counting and measuring the ingredients, estimating how much of each ingredient we need to make a nice loaf of bread.

G: “We are making pretend bread for the house corner.”
J: “We need two spoons of flour.”
O: “I think we need some salt cause some breads are salty.”
K: “This bowl is heavier than the other one because we added more things to it.”

Well… What about our mud kitchen? We’ve noticed that we don’t have any bread in our outdoor kitchen either! We’ve decided to take the ingredients outside and make some playdough for us to use in our mud kitchen!

G: “We can pretend to bake dinners with our playdough!”
A: “It smells lovely because we are using hair conditioner.”
M: “Musimy policzyc trzy lyzki, zeby bylo po rowno.”
M: “That’s flour!”
L: “We need to clean the table after this! We need to use water and soap.”

After preparing our wellies and planters for new seeds, we have finally done some planting! The boys and girls have had lots of fantastic suggestions on what we could plant outside our nursery…

N: “We can plant flowers!”
J: “I want to grow strawberries and flowers.”
G: “What about having vegetable patch?”

Great ideas! We went on a trip to the shops and bought different kinds of seeds. We got our gardening tools out and carefully placed the seeds in little spaces we made for them. To remember what we planted in planters, we made signs using lollipop sticks and our fantastic writing and drawing skills! Great job, boys and girls! We can’t wait to see the end result when the plants start growing!

N: “We put it down deep so the cats and birds don’t eat them.”
K: “We need the aprons too not to get dirty!”
A: “We’ll need to water them.”
G: “I hope the sun is out to keep them warm!”

OF COURSE WE CAN! That’s always our answer! We absolutely love playing and learning in our outside areas! When we came back to nursery after our Summer holidays, the boys and girls decided to freshen up our outdoor garden – we cleaned the whiteboard to make it nice and shiny, we used wet cloth to make the chalkboard ready for our mark-making and we did all of the dishes for the outdoor mud kitchen. What a fantastic job!

R: “I’m going to wet the cloth to clean the chalk off that board.”
G: “Can I spray the water on the whiteboard?”
J: “We need to dust off the mud kitchen.”
O: “But the rain will clean it too!”

To prepare our wellies for planting, we decided to give them a good wash! We used lots of warm soapy water to rinse off the dust and mud! We then put them up on our “washing line” for them to dry off and get ready for planting!

A: “Nice soapy bubbles. We need a bigger jug, it’s heavy!”
H: “I’m doing a good job.”
N: “We could put the wellies on washing line!”
K: “I know what we can plant in them, flowers!”
G: “We can grow peas too!”

When our garden was all nice and ready for us to play again, we had so much fun! From making mud dinners, ice cream and soup, to jumping off the steps and playing lots of games!

And the best part of all…? While the boys and girls were working very hard on the outside area, they all sang together: “WHAT’S GONNA WORK? TEAMWORK!”.

You are all superstars, boys and girls! You all get a HUGE thumbs up from all of the ladies!

Oh, what a quick few days it has been! The boys and girls have been super busy since starting back after Summer holidays! We were all very eager and excited to play with our nursery toys, we all missed them so much! The boys and girls came back to the nursery with big happy smiles on their faces and with lots of holiday stories to share with their friends! We have been chatting about going on holiday abroad, being on a plane, playing in our gardens and visiting local parks! We couldn’t wait to hear all of your exciting Summer memories!

When we came back to nursery, we couldn’t wait to get busy with our nursery friends! There have been a lot of chats about dogs – how many legs they have, what different breeds look like, what baby dogs are called. Some of the children even brought in their dog toys to show everyone!

G: “My dog is called Boxy.”
J: “My doggy is called Spotty, he’s a dalmantian.”
O: “My dog is called Ruby and she’s got a long lead.”
J: “Dogs like to eat bones and play fetch, don’t they?”

The boys and girls have been playing together very well, sharing ideas and inviting each other into their play. There have been a lot of dinosaur play around as well as making horses and even ghosts!

We are so happy to have you back in our class and can’t wait to continue great experiences you all want to learn about!

R: “I went to Malta on holiday. Malta has got lots of boats.”
O: “I went to the caravan and slept in my own bed.”
J: “I’m going to play dinosaurs with K, he’s my best friend.”
C: “It’s a little wet outside, but I’m going to go and play anyway.”

We have had so much fun over last few days in the nursery! The weather has been in our favour with lots of sunshine! We can’t believe we are already at the end of term – what a quick year it has been!

On Friday we had our Sport’s Day. We organised lots of different games and activities in the school’s playground. The boys and girls participated in races including Egg and Spoon race, Hurdle race, Javelin and flat race as well as parachute games! Everybody enjoyed our games and everybody gave 100%! Fantastic job, boys and girls!

M: “I liked the Spoon and Egg race, you need to balance the egg!”
J: “I won, I won!”
R: “I loved the Javelin, mine went very far!”
O: “I liked the parachute.”
E: “My heart is beating fast after the races.”

On Monday we had our Garden Party – we were so lucky to be able to enjoy our party outside as the weather was fantastic! We played lots of fun games like Corners, Musical Statues and Pass the Parcel. And of course – we had lots of dancing too! Of course, no party would be the same without yummy party food, which we loved! For our very special treat we were visited by the ice cream van and all of the boys and girls enjoyed an ice cream cone. What a fabulous day!

M: “I liked the ice-cream the most.”
L: “I won the Corners!”
N: “I can do the floss!”
T: “It’s so hot outside!”
A: “Is the ice cream van coming?!”

We would like to wish you all a happy, fun and safe holiday. Good luck to all of the boys and girls who are going to school and we will see some of you next year!

We have been working really hard to develop our outdoor literacy corner. Thanks to one of our parents, we now have a designated area where we can take forward our language and literacy skills. The boys and girls enjoy sitting outside and reading their favourite stories and discussing the characters with their friends. The children came up with a fantastic idea to “make a roof” as it was too bright to read the books – so we did! We used our big leaves and camouflage material as a canopy. What a cosy literacy corner it has become! The boys and girls are continuing to spend time on coming up with new ideas to further develop the area. What a great job!

M: “We need a roof, it’s too sunny!”
K: “I love reading here.”
R: “It’s fun being outside!”
L: “Can we bring out more books?”

The boys and girls have been using the literacy area to develop their writing and mark making skills – some of the children have brought out the threading letters as well as paper and pencils to draw and write.

G: “I’m going to write a letter and post it.”
C: “Can you read me a story?”
O: “This is my letter.”