nursery – Springfield Primary School and Bonnytoun Nursery School

June 1, 2017

Chicks in nursery

On Monday we were very excited to receive some chick’s eggs in nursery. At first we kept them in a special incubator to keep them warm. We have been carefully observing them and have watched some chicks emerge. Today when we arrived at nursery we discovered that all nine eggs have now hatched. Yesterday they looked very tired and were struggling to stand but today they have really fluffed up and are making lots of noise as they move around their crate. We have discovered that the brown chicks are girls and the yellow ones are boys. This experience has helped us to learn about life-cycles. I wonder if we will observe any changes next week.

May 15, 2017

New life

Lots of excitement at Bonnytoun this week.

We watched on the screen, chicks hatch out of the bird’s eggs. We think the bird in the nest is a coal tit. The parents of the little chicks have been extremely busy feeding them all week.

We also have 10 caterpillars in nursery. We have been watching them grow. Already they have got so much bigger and fatter.

This week we also had grandparents/ Special person day. This was attended by over 90 special people. Thank you to everyone who attended.

March 31, 2017

Learning through play

What a lot of fun we’ve had outdoors this week. Edward’s dad has made a new water resource for us and we’ve been learning about the flow of water as we play. We’ve also been finding out how we can recycle water and we’ve been using mathematical language such as full and empty. We’ve shown good problem-solving skills outdoors when using our outdoor scales and when making a great selection of meals in our muddy kitchen. Can you see Matthew is writing his recipe for his muddy soup.

This week many of our nursery children also visited P1. They had an opportunity to listen to a story read by the P1 teachers and then had a chance to play in a P1 classroom. Many of our children had made Easter hats which they wore during their visit.Thank you to the teachers who really welcomed all our children and to the boys and girls in P1 who were so kind and helpful.

February 24, 2017

mark making in nursery

It is really important for our children to have opportunities to make marks in nursery. Making marks with different resources helps to develop emergent writing. Look at just some of the things we’ve been doing.

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January 25, 2017

Learning about birds

Over the last few weeks we have been setting up a bird-watching area in nursery. We have left only a small viewing area as we didn’t want the birds to fly away when they saw a sudden movement in nursery. We’ve been putting out bird food daily and have even made food kebabs and bird cake for the birds. They seem to prefer the bird cake which is made from fat, bird-seed, raisins and bread. We have been making marks on our bird identification chart to show the birds visiting our garden. We have already observed lots of wood pigeons and magpies as well as a robin, blue tit and a great tit. At our games table we’ve been playing a bird matching game and this is already helping us to identify some common garden birds. In the art area we have been looking at a bird identification book and using this to help create our own birds. In our construction area, we have even seen a bird hotel being built. We’ve been asking parents and children for ideas on what we would now like to learn about birds and have already received some great ideas. Over the next few weeks we hope to learn about how to build nests, migration, different bird sounds and eggs.

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November 25, 2016

It’s getting colder outside!

We’ve enjoyed exploring our outdoor area this week. We left containers filled with water overnight on Wednesday. Look what happened! They had all turned to ice. When we took them inside to show everyone we could see that our ice shapes started to melt in our warm nursery.

We also added some warm water to the frosty, icy ground. It started to melt too but by the afternoon it was very slippy as the water had turned to ice. We had to be very careful. ice-3 ice-12 ice-16 ice-24 ice-14 ice-11

November 7, 2016

Looking at Autumn

We all went on a walk in the school grounds to look for signs of Autumn. We found lots of leaves and sorted these using our own criteria. Some children sorted them by size, some by colour and one child even sorted them in groups depending which ones had spots and which ones didn’t.
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After our walk we discussed what we now wanted to learn about Autumn. Hibernation and being seen in the dark were very popular ideas. We have now set up an area for animals to hibernate in our outside area.

When we were on our Autumn walk, we spotted lots of litter. Next day we decided to go and collect litter. We hope the outdoor area stays free from litter for a long time now.

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October 14, 2016

Nursery- learning about dinosaurs

Dinosaurs

Over the last few weeks we have been learning about dinosaurs. The children wanted to create Dinosaur Kingdom in our outdoor area. Dinosaurs were added to this area, they had pretend eggs and bones. Catriona then created her own sign for this land. The next day we had a dinosaur hunt and everyone had to complete a chart as soon as they saw a dinosaur. We have made clay dinosaurs and fossils and have even discovered bones in our sand tray. In nursery we now have a museum with a dinosaur display. We have posters and talking cards which share our learning. We have also been listening to lots of stories about dinosaurs and have created our own non-fiction dinosaur book.

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September 28, 2016October 3, 2016

Nursery Learning

Harvest

We recently collected our potatoes and carrots from our garden. We were delighted with the harvest we had produced. We used our potatoes to make mashed potatoes, soup and potato salad. We have also been using balance scales to help to compare the weights of the potatoes and have been using the mathematical language, heavier than, lighter than and the same as.

May 18, 2016

Our second chick has arrived. Our children have named them Wendy and Olivia.