We have had a busy two weeks and the warmer weather last week inspired the installation of the ELC’s hot tub last Tuesday. The children took turns to jump in, switch on the bubbles and relax. The children were using detailed expressive language to share their thoughts and develop their play cooperatively with drinks added,  slides into and out of the tub, changing rooms for socks and shoes and life guards to take charge. The children  revisited and developed their hot tub role-play each day last week with a “disco in the tub” on Wednesday and real water added on Thursday for all to have a cooling off paddle.

The children have enjoyed making crawling caterpillars, some longer than others. They have expressed their understanding of symmetry through butterfly creations, developing their gluing and printing skills.

The parachute has been used to support the children’s representations (through their body movements) of the lifecycle of the butterfly from tiny eggs to caterpillars, chrysalis and finally a butterfly with beautiful wings.

ELC have joined in the other classes’ fitness routine of running or walking around the school for the Daily Mile with ALL of the children completing a lap on Wednesday….and staff too! This helps to support  their understanding of wellbeing through being active daily.

The children have also set up an ice-cream shop in the garden with an extensive menu board, which they have enjoyed using for role play. They have also been investigating which bugs are living in the Bug Hotel.

Miss Thomson has taken part in a Play on Pedals training day this week and some of the older children were able to take part in a short practice session. We are excited that all the ELC children next year will be able to experience Play on Pedals sessions regularly.

Finally, we are very much looking forward to welcoming all our parents in to ELC during our Back in the Building open mornings   which will be on Friday 27th May from 9.10am-10.10am and Thursday 2nd June from 8.45am-10.10am.  This will be an opportunity for you to spend time in ELC with your child and to speak to all the ELC staff team.

Sustainability in Action

A new compost bin has been put in place with some of the children helping Mrs Stewart to begin the compost making process. Together they found the ingredients for a good compost including, paper, cardboard, fruit and veg left overs and tea bags – staff do get an occasional cuppa! The final ingredient was water before a good stir and popping the lid on and leaving nature to do the rest. All the children have begun to put any fruit and veg waste into a designated collection bucket after their snack and during the week some will have the responsibility of adding it to the compost.

Nurturing Nature

With the warmer weather many of the children have been noticing wildlife in the garden. A creature found in the digging area prompted much discussion as, whilst initially they thought it was a worm, it moved like a caterpillar. The children decided it needed a vacation and promptly booked it into the bug hotel!

Taking a Closer Look

Indoors the children have had the opportunity to take a closer look at themselves and many have gone on to choose to create self-portraits of themselves.

Developing Fine Motor Skills

Staff have been supporting children to develop their scissor skills and challenging those that are ready to cut around pictures. Many children have been developing their early writing skills labelling their pictures, paintings and creations with their names.

Keep the Heid and Read

Children in Nursery enjoyed listening to a story in line with the school’s 6 minute pause on Wednesday for the Keep the Heid and Read initiative.

It has been a short week in ELC this week following the May holiday weekend, but we have been busy nurturing our plants and we can see that they are starting to grow. The children have made a mini greenhouse from recycled plastic  to protect the vegetables from frost. This will also help protect the strawberries from the birds.  The children also thought about using string, sticks and tin foil to scare away the birds.

We are supporting the children to understand which foods are healthy and which are not as healthy through our snack and lunch choices and our discussions about different foods and what makes them a healthy choice. The children have also been sorting foods into groupings and working together to plan healthy snacks for ELC.

We have also been busy planning the transitions for our ELC 4 children moving on to Primary 1 and there will be more information about this soon in our May newsletter, on our noticeboard and by direct contact to the ELC 4 parents.

Our new ELC August starts will also be contacted with further information about their transition very soon.

This week we have been refreshing our dressing up resources and the children were keen to use the materials and costumes to be knights and princesses. They made a fabulous castle in the garden and showed great creativity in making and decorating crowns, shields and bows and arrows. They practised their fine motor skills through mark making, cutting and sticking. They also problem solved to develop their bows and arrows and tested them to see how they could improve them.

The children have also continued to develop their mathematical vocabulary by comparing the sizes of objects and putting them into order. The children  enjoyed marking their heights on the window and seeing how they are all different. They also compared the sizes of their hands and feet. We now have a shoe shop and the children are enjoying practising measuring each others feet, fitting shoes carefully and buying and selling the shoes to each other. They also developed a game in the garden to compare how far the cars travelled by making a ramp and using  piping for the cars to travel down. The children marked the distance each car travelled and compared these to see which cars travelled the furthest. They also used different size bowls and spoons in the water and sand trays and talked about which sizes were best for different activities.

The daily tooth brushing is going very well and the children are continuing to practise cleaning their teeth carefully and talking about why this is important. They are very good at making sure they match the picture on their brush to the one in the toothbrush holder, so that they only use their own toothbrush. Hopefully, the Childsmile people will be back for another visit soon and we can show them how good we are at cleaning our teeth.

Finally, we hope you all have a lovely Bank Holiday weekend and we look forward to welcoming you back on Wednesday 4th May.