What a busy week we have had in the ELC celebrating our love of books. It was lovely to see all our children dressed up as their favourite story characters. They had a lot of fun showing off their costumes and retelling their stories. The children have enjoyed participating in lots story related activities and even had a visit to the library.
Here are just a few pictures of what they have been up to.
This week the children were inspired to have a teddy bears picnic after hearing the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. They had great fun engaging in role play and created their own imaginative stories, which was lovely to hear. The children enjoyed pretending to be different family members using the bear masks and they enjoyed playing with the toy food. We also explored mathematical language such as, big, bigger, biggest, tiny, small, smallest and middle sized. We explored size through a game using 2D porridge bowls where the children put porridge on the small bowl, middle-sized bowl or large bowl. They were very successful with understanding mathematical language, but found identifying the middle-sized bowl the trickiest. Well done boys and girls.
Happy Halloween!
The children in the ELC have had a great week celebrating Halloween. They came to nursery dressed up in amazing costumes, took party in party games, went Dookin for apples and made some spooky arts and crafts. Here are just some of the activities they took part in.
Congratulations
We would like to say a huge congratulations to Miss Malone on becoming a published Author. She has recently had her first book “Nigel the Naughty broomstick” published and our children love it!!! We are so luck to have such a talented member of staff in our nursery.
Summer Holidays
The nursery will be open throughout the summer holidays as normal. If your child won’t be attending can you please let a member of staff know.
Pre – school Leavers
Unfortunately we haven’t been able to have a Leavers Assembly this year so we have put together a Graduation sway to share with our pre-school children . The sway will be sent out v ia email to all our pre-school parents . We want to wish them all good luck as they start their journey to P1.
Mrs Nicoll will be leaving us during the summer holidays. We want to wish her luck and happiness for the future and are going to miss her very much.
The children have had a fantastic week engaging in lots of new learning. Through group discussion the children observed that we have had a lot of rainy days. They spoke about splashing in puddles and wearing their wellies. This opened up the children’s curiosity to find out more about where rain comes from and how it is formed. The children listened to a story called the Rainy Day and watched a children’s science documentary which explained the cycle of water. Through this the children learned how that the water cycle consists of four main processes which are evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection. In order to enhance the children’s learning we decided to make our own water cycle diagram which illustrates this process. Some of the children also made their own art work which illustrated and interpreted their understanding. It has been wonderful to listen to the children use scientific terms to describe their work. Furthermore we now plan to track how much rain water falls on a weekly basis. We have placed several buckets in the garden and will measure the water each week, we will keep you updated on this. Please also look out for some of our fantastic science experiments which will follow in the coming weeks.
Following on from our mini beast madness blog the children have continued to make butterflies and have chatted a lot about symmetry. In order to extend the children’s learning they have been participating in lots of smart board activities which looked at matching shapes and patterns. The children really enjoyed this and were fantastic at matching the corresponding pattern. The children have also been busy making various symmetrical pictures. They have worked collaboratively and have displayed good problem solving skills. They have also used squared paper to make their own symmetrical pattern, which is amazing. This has been a fantastic week for fun mathematical and science learning. Well done everyone!
The nursery children have been very busy making lots of spring time observations this week. They were delighted to find a centipede in the nursery and used their magnifying glasses to take a closer look at it . Some children noted how it had lots of legs and moved really fast and that although it was small it was long too. This prompted a mini beast hunt outside to see how many we could find in our garden.
Here are some of the activities that followed.
The children made this wonderful art display which illustrates the lifecycle of a butterfly . The children worked collaboratively and discussed what materials they would use. Some children thought it was a good idea to label the illustration using some of the new vocabulary they had learned. with some adult help the were able to copy the words and display them on our wall.
Lots of mathematical language was used during our discussions. We spoke about symmetry and how both sides of the butterfly were the same. Some of children made some of their own symmetrical butterflies and could talk about symmetry. We played a lady bug counting game on the smart board where the children could touch count or subitise the spots.
It has been so nice to see all our children returning to nursery after lockdown. They have all settled back into the routine really well and are coping brilliantly in their new ‘Bubbles’.
It has been a busy week with the children enjoying the arrival of our new sensory tent and light up toys.
We have introduced our new Spring topic this week after the children noted some of the seasonal changes taking place outside.
Here are some of the spring activities we had in nursery. The most popular was our shop where they could pretend to buy flowers, fruit and veg using real money. Lots of opportunity to count and recognise numbers.
They were all very excited to spot a Bee in the nursery and as a result the children decided it would be a great idea to make their own beehive . They researched what beehives look like and then tried to create their own using black crepe paper and yellow paint. lots of lovely pictures were produced by our talented children.
To celebrate St. Andrews day the children have been learning lots about Scotland this week. They watched a short video about St. Andrew, found Scotland on a map, did lots of arts and crafts and took part in some highland dancing .
While trying to find Scotland on our map the children spotted the Scottish flag and decided to try and make their own using blue and white paper.
We then had a look at lots of different types of Tartan and attempted to copy our favourites .
Here are some photos of our learning.
Today in the nursery we had our first mindfulness session . After lunch, the children relaxed in our mindfulness space which has soft lighting and relaxing music. Ensuring all children were comfortable, we began our session focussing on our breathing .Using their own imagination, the children imagined they were smelling a flower and then blowing a leaf away. Continuing the breathing theme the children demonstrated Bubble breathing, Bumblebee breathing and Rainbow breathing with gentle guidance.
