Celebrating the life of Robert Burns!

The Nursery are learning and celebrating the life of Robert Burns. Children are experiencing the sounds of Scottish poetry, music and songs. The sounds of bagpipes are being played daily and the voices of children learning songs such as,  Three Craws, Ally Bally, You cannae shove granny and The Midgies, can be heard from the Nursery. Children are sampling tartan and looking at photographs of kilts. This week children are exploring how to make tartan and creating some tartan with paint and variety of collage materials. Children will have the opportunity to engage with a variety of Scottish fiction and Non Fiction stories.

Next week:

We will be exploring our senses as we look, smell and taste…Oatcakes, cheese, porridge, Haggis, Neeps and Tatties.

We are also very excited to announce that we will be fortunate enough to have a special visitor on Monday 25th January to play us some traditional bagpipe music both in the morning and afternoon nursery sessions.

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Wraparound

Wraparound will be available for children currently using the flexible nursery provision over the February Holidays, Easter Holidays and Summer Holidays at specific settings:

Bathgate Early Years Centre, Inveralmond Early Years Centre and Linlithgow Primary School Nursery.

Only Inveralmond Early Years Centre and Bathgate Early Years Centre are open during the Summer Holidays.

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If you wish your child to use this service during the holiday periods please contact the centre if your choice to make enquirers about the provision and to book a place.

Inveralmond Early Years Centre: Willow Bank, Ladywell EH54 6HN, 01506 537000

Bathgate Early Years Centre: 55B Whitedalehead Road, Bathgate, EH47 8JU, 01506 744380

Linlithgow Primary School Nursery: Preston Road, Linlithgow, EH49 6HB, 01505 842686

Peep 1

We have enjoyed an amazing few months at Peep 1. We have have been learning our colours with sensory play. Children have had colour themed weeks using water , sand , paint and treasure baskets. We have focused on the shape “Circle” learning how the shape feels and looks. We have explored balls of all sizes and textures. The most popular stories read, during this session was,  “Hooray for fish” and “Sharing a shell”.  We discovered that rhyming books are a great way to gain interest from young babies at story time, listening to the sounds and pace of our voice.  The babies where introduced to a new circle time song “I am tapping on the drum”. The song involved a drum being passed around the group, identifying the child by name, tapping on the drum  and repeating the song for each childs turn. It took no time at all, before our babies tapped/banged on the drums. For some babies, this was the first time they have used this type of skill. It was clearly demonstrated that routine is an extremely important part of children s learning! We have ended this session with a Christmas craft session, making our own Christmas decoration and tree.  We also enjoyed a puppet show, baby photo booth and party music!!!

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Worms

 

 

When we were digging in our Mud Kitchen we found lots of big juicy worms. Mrs McNee explained that worms are good for the soil as they “break it all up”.

We didn’t understand what she was saying so we invited the Local Authority Waste Management Department to bring their wormery to the nursery to show us. Joanna from Waste Management, explained that a wormery had a kitchen, a livingroom and a bathroom. The kitchen is on the top floor and we added chopped vegetables for the worms to eat. The livingroom is in the middle as this is where they bury themselves in the soil. The bathroom is on the bottom floor and they go there to cool down.

We learned that worms do not like to eat meat, crisps, sweets or animal poo!

We observed and cared for the worms for 1 week and now have a better understanding of how important they are to our soil.

Our Scottish Learning

We have been very busy learning all about the country we live in. We have tasted haggis, neeps and tatties, baked shortbread and finished off with some oatcakes and cheese.

We have been learning about tartan patterns and have created our own tartan kilts using strips of paper at our PEEP classes with our carers.  We also looked at patterns created by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and created stained glass windows.

We now know that the Scottish flag is called a Saltire and the Scottish flower is called a Thistle.

We have also shared our learning with our Primary 2 friends by joining in with singing the songs we have learned. They treated us to a rendition of “If You’re a Midgie and You Know It”, whilst we sang “Ye Cannae Shove Yer Grannie Aff a Bus”. We finished off by all joining together to sing “Three Craws Sat Upon A Waa”.

 

Haggis, Yum!
Haggis, Yum!
Haggis Neeps and Tatties
Haggis Neeps and Tatties
Working together to bake shortbread
Working together to bake shortbread
Baking Shortbread
Baking Shortbread
PEEP 3s creating Tartan Kilts
PEEP 3s creating Tartan Kilts

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Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Charles Rennie Mackintosh

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Still Life Paintings of Scottish Thistles
Still Life Paintings of Scottish Thistles
Still Life Paintings of Scottish Thistles
Still Life Paintings of Scottish Thistles
Sharing our Learning with Primary 2
Sharing our Learning with Primary 2
Sharing our Learning with Primary 2
Sharing our Learning with Primary 2

Sensory Learning

We have been using our senses to help us learn and have enjoyed getting messy in the process! We have been having fun playing in our rice pit running the rice through our fingers and watching it bounce and make noises, we thought sounded like rain. It felt cold and smooth as we played with it. We have also been making volcanos with vinegar and bicarbonate soda. We thought that the vinegar smelled yucky but we liked how it fizzed and frothed as it exploded. We have been playing with paint and loved squishing and squeezing it through our fingers and rubbing it up our arms, making hand and arm prints in the process. During the cold weather we froze water and once frozen and hard put it in the water tray and spent a long time playing with it as it melted in our warm hands, it felt very cold and wet. Last week we began to dry slices of fruit to make decorations for our natural sensory Christmas tree. We have also made popcorn which we have threaded together to make garlands. It smelled so nice when we cooked it we just had to eat it! Our tree looks and smells great.

National Galleries of Scotland Competition

This year some of the nursery children took part in National Galleries of Scotland art competition. Over 7000 children from across Scotland entered the competition and we were delighted to be informed that two of our children had won an award in the nursery category. Congratulations go to Owen Davies who won 3rd place and to Katie Ewesor who was awarded a special merit.
As part of Owen’s prize the nursery was given an opportunity to attend the Gallery for a special tour and a practical workshop.
We went on the bus and were welcomed by the staff. We were taken around the Gallery and learned about some of the pictures. We then got messy! We made our own pictures using paint, glue, pens and crayons and produced lovely flowers in vases. We had a great day out. We will display our paintings in our own gallery next week.
Katie and Owen will attend an awards ceremony at the gallery to receive their awards and then their pictures will be displayed in the gallery until October when the full competition exhibition will then travel around various venues in Scotland.
A big well done to Owen and Katie and thank you also to the National Galleries of Scotland for the great opportunity which we all enjoyed.

Nursery Garden

We have been busy weeding and planting in our nursery garden as we work towards gaining our green flag award.
We have also been learning about healthy eating in the nursery so we invited Willie Carruthers the community gardener along to show us how to plant properly and talk to us about different types of fruit and vegetables we can grow in our garden. We have at the moment planted strawberries, peas, potatoes, carrots and cabbage and we are looking after them and eagerly awaiting to see the first signs of growth.
The photographer from the West Lothian Courier came along and took our photograph and our picture appeared in the paper that week.

Marie Curie

We recently took part in the Marie Curie Mini Pots of Care fundraiser. Mini Pots of Care is a fun and creative way for children aged 3 to 11 to learn about science, nature and the work of charities. While we were learning we raised money to help Marie Curie Nurses care for people with any terminal illness. We planted our daffodils in November and helped to care for them and water them. Once they were ready we decorated our pots and took them home. We raised a fantastic £137.46 Thank you to everyone who made a donation and well done.

Fairtrade Fortnight

We have been learning about Fairtrade and Foncho the Fairtrade Banana Farmer and can now recognise Fairtrade products by the symbol on them.
We ate Bananas all week at snack. Banana Smoothies, Banana Sandwiches and homemade Banana Cake it was delicious.
We decided to have a Fairtrade Coffee Morning and made our own posters to advertise our event.
On the day we helped to serve our parents and carers tea, coffee and cake and retold them the story of Foncho.
We celebrated our learning at the primary school assembly last Friday morning by telling the boys and girls of Foncho the Banana Farmer.

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