Please pay attention to dates for your diary….
We are an Eco School
As you may already be aware Bathgate Early Years Centre is an Eco School. Children and Mrs Ola and Miss Heenan have been working extremely hard to develop our Eco area and bird hide in nursery.
This month we are learning about;
- the importance of saving water and how we can do this in nursery by recycling rainwater and left over water from snack to water our plants.
- growing plants and beans from seed and observing and measuring the stages of growth and what we need to do to enable them to grow.
- caring for our garden birds and beginning to identify them by sight and sound. Have you heard all about the big giant pigeon that visits our garden and eats up all the bird food? Sometimes we are visited by a grey squirrel too!
We also had a special visit from a landscape gardener this week. Miss Robertson’s brother Jamie helped us learn all about his job and what we can do at nursery to grow and care for our plants. He brought along lots of tools and explained what he uses them for at work. He kindly donated sunflower seeds, pots and compost to enable us to grow lovely yellow sunflowers we can plant in our garden when it is summer time and a bit warmer outside. Thank you very much Miss Robertson and Jamie!
https://youtu.be/yGGHbpjup7U
Please come in and have a look in nursery and on our Eco Schools news board to find out more.
We would like to share our learning near and far and encourage readers to come to our blog. Please don’t share pictures and videos from our blog but instead share a link to our blog and bring your friends and family to us.
Digital art
Have you wondered what we used all our ‘treasures’ that we collected from our outings to Beecraigs Country Park for? After lots of exploratory play with them in nursery we took all the natural resources outside to make pictures with them on the ground. Just like the artist Andy Goldsworthy, we used our natural resources as material to create pieces of art. We used iPads to look on the internet to find out how Andy Goldsworthy uses nature to create his exhibitions. We saved our favorite pieces of his work to the camera roll and used them to help us plan our own natural art.
We then photographed our pieces of work just like he does on the iPads. Our next steps are to share our photographs with our friends and discuss our ideas.
Do you like our giant? We worked together as a team, shared our ideas and designed our giant together.
Splashing in the puddles…….
This is one of the reasons we have no spare socks left but splashing in the puddles is just so much fun!!
https://youtu.be/73cvyRlbjgE
We would like to share our learning near and far and encourage readers to come to our blog. Please don’t share pictures and videos from our blog but instead share a link to our blog and bring your friends and family to us.
Today is Safer Internet Day
Please see post below for more information on what you can do to help keep children safe online.
Puppet Show Performances at BEYC.
Following on from children’s home interests we have been exploring the puppet theater in nursery and have encouraged children to bring in their puppets from home. We then introduced the story making Ipad for the children to record their puppet show performances. The children assigned roles of directors, actors and film crew and then helped Miss Kelly to edit the videos. We deleted unwanted footage of our shoes and the floor and kept content we agreed was interesting and funny.
Please can you help us by donating some long socks so we can make our own sock puppets next week?
Here is a little clip of some of our puppet shows from this week.
We are learning to think about what the characters say and do and think of a beginning and middle and an end for our puppet shows.
https://youtu.be/8lW01ujMkBU
We would like to share our learning near and far and encourage readers to come to our blog. Please don’t share pictures and videos from our blog but instead share a link to our blog and bring your friends and family to us
Celebrating Success at Bathgate Early Years Centre
We are delighted to announce Bathgate Early Years Centre has been awarded status of the Digital Schools Award Scotland. On completion of a self evaluation process we received a validation visit from Lee Dunn (Education Scotland and Glasgow University) on Tuesday 31st of January. Lee met with Mrs Lynch, Miss Wilkinson and Mrs Kerr (West Lothian Education ICT Development Team) to discuss the centres digital journey to date and our plans for future developments. Lee then spent some time in nursery interacting with children and staff and observed a variety of activities indoors and outside that demonstrated the high-levels of ICT-enriched teaching and learning.
You will see from the congratulations-letter-bathgate-early-years-centre that BEYC is among one of the first schools in Scotland to receive this new award.
“My visit to the school was well organised with a range of activities available that demonstrated the high-levels of ICT-enriched teaching and learning. My presentation with staff and pupils proved to be an insightful professional dialogue about innovation and inspiring children. There was a clear sense that the children where involved in their own learning, making connections between the home and the school through online technologies such as GLOW. We had a discussion on the affordances of technology to support those with Additional Support Needs and the school provided examples of where technology is used to communicate with children where English is not their first language. Clearly, leadership in the school supports digital learning and is prioritising this area for development. I am confident that the School will continue to develop and deepen its understanding of the use of ICT and continue to seek out, among the bewildering array of software and hardware applications those that best support teaching and learning. It is my recommendation that the School has achieved the Digital Schools Award (Scotland).”
You can view the full report here bathgate-eyc-validaton-report-2
We look forward to supporting other establishments in working towards their future applications.
Exciting Writing…
Please come into nursery to have a look at our graphics area display. The children have been practicing their name and environmental print writing. We even had some fantastic ‘bubble writing’. Some children attempted the challenge of copying the Chinese symbols to celebrate Chinese New Year.
We would like to share our learning near and far and encourage readers to come to our blog. Please don’t share pictures and videos from our blog but instead share a link to our blog and bring your friends and family to us.
Nursery visit to Beecraigs Country Park
We would like to share our learning near and far and encourage readers to come to our blog. Please don’t share pictures and videos from our blog but instead share a link to our blog and bring your friends and family to us.
Learning about Vegetables with Tracey
Tracey, (Bathgate’s Tesco Community Champion) came to visit us in nursery, we read ‘The Giant Turnip’ story and then began to discuss where vegetables grow either underground or above ground. We also had a yummy taster session where we tried a variety of vegetables such as spring onion, cucumber, leeks, beetroot, broccoli, parsnip, potatoes, celery, turnip, cabbage and carrots.
Thank you Tracey!
We would like to share our learning near and far and encourage readers to come to our blog. Please don’t share pictures and videos from our blog but instead share a link to our blog and bring your friends and family to us.
