Happyhansel Early Years

Welcome back everyone – especially our new starts! We have had a busy first week back with lots of settling in activities and free play in the setting to allow us to remember our routines and rules (Choose It, Use It, Put It Away!) and get used to getting up and out the door to nursery in the morning.

T1 W1 18-19 T1 W2 18-19

The teachers have been working hard on paperwork and as well as the plans we have been sharing with parents for a few terms now, we are also compiling a nursery handbook and you can expect a newsletter before the end of term too. We are looking at a new way of planning and tracking for each individual child, hopefully with more input from home as part of this, but we need to get the process ironed out properly before we go live with it to parents! You should start to see changes to the Learning Stories in your child’s tray before the end of the term and the new planning and tracking process introduced before Christmas.

Our Vision, Values and Aims will be next on the list to update..

So today all our Early Years children graduated! Our first years moving on to the next year of adventures and our older children starting their exciting journey into Primary 1!

They have been a really great group and we wish them all the best for their school chapter. And can’t wait to see the first years return! We will see you around the school though and don’t be afraid to come and say hi!

We were so proud watching them all graduate and seeing how far they have come. It has been another amazing year watching them grow and become these wondering individuals!

In our setting it’s a learning journey for everyone including the staff and every year we learn and expand our skills too! Very excited for what next year brings!

Hope you all have a great summer! 🙂

Here is the plan for the second last week of term! We are looking ahead to Graduation – we’ll be having a peerie ceremony on the last Thursday with a party on the last day of term. We’ll send home details soon in a note and on the notice board.

Our Interests and Likes Board has been up and running for a while now. It is up in our entrance for everyone to see and for anyone who cares about a child to add information to. We’ve found it to be a great way for the bairns to speak about their learning and they love adding things to it themselves and showing off their space on the board to people. We speak about individual interests as well as shared ones.

We leave a pen out for parents and carers to add to or take away as interests change, and staff are always adding things too.

Some of the additional benefits we have seen so far have been:

• it is useful for new members of staff/supply staff to help them remember names and for them to  make a connection with children straight away
• staff use it to help inform planning, making it another tool in our child-led approach
• it is good for information sharing between staff, parents and children
• apart from their learning folders, pegs and trays, it is another space dedicated solely to a child – helpful in a place where sharing is usually the norm
• the bairns love it and really open up when given the chance to speak about themselves

Please have a look and remember to add or change the board as necessary. What do other Early Years Setting do? We’d love to find out if you have any ideas to help make this even better!

Sandwick Junior High have entered a competition with Jewsons to win money to build an observatory and they need your votes! The new observatory will be approximately 12m2 and will house a telescope built in Lerwick by amateur astronomer Billy Kay in the 1960s. It will be used by the school and by the local community so some of our pupils could also benefit in the future. It’s a worthwhile project to support for everyone in Shetland so if you have a spare minute head to https://www.buildingbettercommunities.co.uk/community-project/community-project-entry-3173/ and help them out.

One of our pupils had a very important job last week – he was Protector of the Rings for his mum and dad’s wedding!

We hear he did a brilliant job. Doesn’t he look smart?

Congratulations to the happy couple. We wish you all the best.

Here is the plan for week 9:

Please let us know what you think. We were really pleased to hear at the Parents’ ‘Evenings’ that some of you are trying out our home suggestions.

We have had a lovely day getting to chat to some parent’s about their children. If anyone has not managed to get an appointment then please get in touch and we will fit you in next week.

The older children went over to P1 for another visit and had a brilliant time – lots of building, colouring in and even snack and play time with the big ones! We shall ask Mrs Thomson if she has any photos to share with us.

We were also busy back in the Early Years as we had visits from some of the children who will be starting with us after the holidays. It was great having some new people to play with and the teachers loved finally getting to meet the children. We had lots of playing and snack here too and it looks like we are going to have another really good group of children next year too. Lucky us!

We were so busy we didn’t manage to get any photos taken today – we will try harder tomorrow!

After several weeks of watering and weeding we have started to notice some leaves poking up through the soil where we planted our potatoes! This is very exciting.

We have been watering them:

And taking turns to help:

If you are visiting the school playground over the weekend and notice a weed or two then please feel free to help us out by pulling a few up. We hope to have enough tatties to make some soup later in the year.