Nursery News!

Roll up, roll up, the St Ninian’s Nursery Restaurant is open for business!

After a huge interest in creating a restaurant in our nursery, we have enjoyed transforming our role play area into a restaurant and takeaway! Our consultative planner is now on the learning wall – we urge you to take a look and see some of the fantastic ideas our children have come up with;

‘I go to restaurants with my family’ Lily

‘I went to a restaurant with my mum and dad, we saw Rojin there…’ Shay

‘It was McDonald’s!’ Rojin

‘The cookers make the food.. It’s called a chef..’ Shea

‘I’m washing the dishes’ Freya (Dylan was drying the dishes!)

We are not at nursery Monday or Tuesday next week – maybe you could take your child around some different restaurants to see the signage, menus, tables/chair set up and talk about what kind of food they serve – no need to go in and eat! We are going to talk about the difference between a restaurant and a cafe next week, we are hoping to visit the Candi Bean across the road and the Lanthorn Community Cafe to ask some questions! If your child has a really good question to ask, write it on a post it and stick on our learning wall!

We use a Thursday/Friday session to do a changeover of resources or to move around the areas of our nursery.. This week we have been noticing a lot of sand on the floor, with some children taking to sitting on the floor playing with the fallen sand. We have decided to create a sandpit on the floor this week to see if the children respond to this in different ways – the sand table has been swapped for water and the easel has been moved – we find a wee reshuffle every few weeks can reignite the children’s excitement about their learning environment! Have you seen or heard of any great ideas for early years? Maybe you are handy with a screw driver and can create wonderous things from pallets?? We are always on the look out for help and support to make our nursery a stimulating place to be!

Our boys and girls have enjoyed their ‘Learning Conversations’ this week with their key worker! Our GIRFEC focus this month is ‘respected’ and as such we wanted to think of the ways we hear our children’s voices in the nursery. The learning conversations will continue into next week and be presented at parents night alongside the tracker documents we use to gauge progress.

It was custard on the menu for food prep Thursday this week! The rich discussion that comes from food preparation is amazing – in this instance the wet and dry ingredients combining made for lots of chat about textures – great vocabulary on display. There was then the miracle of the white ingredients combining to make yellow custard! How exciting! We discussed safety – the custard has to be made on the hob, when the hob is on you should not go near the cooker area as it is hot and there is the risk of burning. We are so pleased with the engagement and focus of our children on food prep thursday and will continue this into the coming term 🙂 if you have any food prep photos from home, please share on our social media accounts or on on the online journal gallery area!

No nursery Monday or Tuesday – Have a lovely long weekend!