Happyhansel Early Years

The wild weather has made our outside area a bit messy and dirty so everyone mucked in to help sweep, tidy and wash it today. Thank good ness it was so sunny!

Lots of the children are able to put their shoes and smucks on the correct feet but sometimes we forget and sometimes it is just easier to ask a grown up to do it for you. All the bairns have been practicing hard to remember to try for themselves and they have done well. Here are just two of them.

Lots of imaginative play still – here are Michael and Fraser in their boat with a till, a hard hat and a magic stick!

Finally for today – we are still looking at mushrooms and have been cutting them up. We are going to buy some from the shop to try for snack next week.

Elsah said: “I’m cutting up the mushrooms and playing. Some of them are poisonous so we don’t eat them.”

This week has been very creative in the nursery, with a variety of art and models made by everyone.

We had some great paintings – we are using the empty hand soap dispensers which everyone brought in (thank you!) so that the children can easily help themselves to their paint colours of choice. They have  loved experimenting and seeing how the colours mix and change.

The junk modelling is still a massive hit and we have had some brilliant creations lately. Here is Magnus with his blackbird and Eilidh in the process of ‘making a pumpkin with sellotape’. There have been lots of paper fans made and they are now being incorporated into the models.

We always have a look at the plants, animals and birds when we are out and about and try to spot what has changed since the last time we had a good look, but we have started using a nature curriculum which is linked to the weeks of the year. Week one of November is mushrooms, so we headed up to the Bod Garden for a look.

We were well wrapped up and only had one peerie shower- and a rainbow – on what looked like it could end up being a horrible day of weather.

We took magnifying glasses, clip boards and paper for drawing any we saw, and some guide books to help us identify them.

We didn’t find any of the weird and wonderful ones we had been looking at back in the nursery, but we did find a few and think we may have identified them too. We all have nature diaries back at the nursery which we can fill in if we want to.

We plan to try and get out and look for something every week – we go out in all but the worst weather. Rain and wind together is not fun! Please let us know if you see any musrooms near the nursery which we could go and visit.

We extended the Halloween fun by going guizing to Wastview today. As well as dressing up, we carved some pumpkins, shared stories and snack with the residents, and got to know everyone better.

We also dooked for apples!

We are going back for at least one more visit this term – Christmas themed of course. Thank you to everyone at Wastview for making us feel so welcome.

We had a brilliant visit to the Church Café to celebrate the last day of term. It was a really fun, windy walk and we were able to practice all the things we have been talking about to stay safe when we are out walking. We had to hold on to each other very tightly to stop us blowing away!

There were only five children as some of us are a bit poorly and some of us are away on holiday, but we still had a great time. We all had a cake we chose ourselves, and a cup of tea – some of us had never had a cup of tea before but everyone liked it apart from one person.

We all told the lady at the till what we had had to eat and paid for our own food. We were very good at remembering our manners.

We had time for a play at the end. We did lots of shape sorting, playing cafes and playing mums and dads and babies. One of the babies was (pretending to be!) a bit naughty as you may see from the photos!

Have a fabulous holiday everyone and thank you to all parents and family members who have been so supportive over the term. We always say we have got such a good bunch of bairns but we also have such a good bunch of families too!

We are back on Wednesday 31st and staff are going on some really exciting training as part of in-service on the Monday and Tuesday so they are hoping to use what they learn to make a positive impact in the setting in Term 2. Watch this space!

Remember that we are planning a Halloween Party at Wastview on the first Thursday of term.

Hello everyone, this is just a quick post to remind you that we are visiting the Church Café as a nice outing on the last day of term – tomorrow. We are going to walk down to arrive at 10.30am and we welcome extra grownups (you will be rewarded with a cuppa and a cake!)

There is a suggested donation of £1 per child to help keep our snack money topped up. We look forward to sharing some food and cups of tea with you – we have a small enough number of pupils now that we have all been eating snack together every day and we have been focusing on our manners, trying new food, and chatting and spending time with people that we love while sharing food. We hope to extend that experience tomorrow and look forward to some grown ups joining us.

We can’t believe it is the end of term already! This has gone so fast. We have had such a good Term 1 and all of our new starts have settled in really well.

Everyone has been helping get the nursery nice and clean and tidy ready for coming in for s fresh start for Term 2. The toys are being really well cleaned “so we don’t all get germs” and “to make everything look all nice”. It fits in well with our Choose It , Use It, Put It Away rule too as we are learning that there are different ways we can look after our toys.

We have also been working hard to put together our Welcome Pack and parents who came today would have been able to pick up their copy. The lack of an information pack when first attending Happyhansel Early Years was something that parents agreed with us was not ideal. This is the first attempt at it and is a working document so we encourage feedback and suggestions of all kinds.

Nursery Handbook 2018-19

We had so much fun at PE. We did the Beans Game where we had to do different actions when our teachers shouted out different types of beans. James helped us remember all the different actions – here he is doing String Bean!

Can you guess what these beans are?

We also all chose different animals to try and move like – and sound like! Have a look and see if you can guess what animals we are being here…

We are trying to find different ways to eat new foods and one of us decided that making smoothies would be a good way to eat our fruit at snack time.

Miss Handley helped us stay safe while we cut up the fruit and loaded up the smoothie machine.

It was really fun pressing the button – especially when Miss Handley had not put the lid on properly!

The smoothies tasted ‘really yummy’, ‘delicious’ but the strawberry one was ‘a bit yucky’ and ‘stingy’. We will try different recipes next time.

We had a brilliant visit to Wastview Care Centre today. We are really lucky that we can walk there and that all the staff and residents are keen to have us.

Mrs Geddes did a Bookbug session with everyone and we sang songs and read some books. We also played some games with the big blanket which was really fun, especially when some of the people who stay at Wastview came and joined in.

We then shared some of our favourite books with the grown ups and had a lovely snack. The staff at Wastview had prepared loads of fruit so we asked everyone if they would like some too, loaded up their bowls with fruit for them and took it to where they were sitting.

We are planning to go back again in November for a Halloween party as we had so much fun.