Mrs Conway

Nursery News

This week has been action packed – including the return of some snow!

The boys and girls have been full of creativity this week, painting on cling film, painting faces on plastic sheets – these exciting experiences have built on all the fun of tartan painting last week and have filled our easel with beautiful art work! We have been really interested in faces this week – have a look at our doorway to the school hall to see some of our handy work 🙂 this is something you can explore at home by checking what naming words your child knows to describe their face; eyes, nose, mouth are straightforward but what about nostrils, eyebrows and earlobes?

Food Prep snack on Thursday was scrambled eggs! Each week we take suggestions for food prep snack from our children and this week Lucy (AM) asked to make scrambled eggs! Miss Burns had a great time with the children as they cracked their eggs, added milk and margarine and whisked them before Miss Burns cooked them in the pan – the queue for snack was a mile long and the mini chefs were very proud of their accomplishments! Maybe your child could have a go this weekend? Share photos on their online journal gallery and/or our Facebook and twitter accounts!

Welly Wednesday was almost cancelled again due our glorious Scottish weather but fortunately we made it out, however briefly for some of us! As our Welly Wednesday sessions continue, Mrs Martinek has used the feedback from parents/children to create a plan for welly Wednesdays between now and the Easter holidays – hopefully as the weather improves so will the time we have available to explore on Welly Wednesday sessions!

Today we bade farewell to Miss Pinkett our college student who has been with us Wed/Thurs over the last few months! She has made a wonderful impression on our young people and will make a great practitioner when she qualifies next year – goodbye and good luck Miss Pinkett!

Please ensure you are receiving our weekly update emails over the weekend – any problems please speak to your child’s key worker 🙂

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

Och aye the noo and lang may yer lum reek!

The nursery has been alive with thoughts of Scotland this week! Tartan, haggis and highland dancing – what more can you want!

Mrs Beattie tested the power of many a families washing machine this week after ‘ball painting’ with the boys and girls to make a lovely tartan shawl! The laughter and engagement in this activity was fantastic with many of our boys and girls choosing to join in. The end result of rolling balls covered in paint in lines across a large bit of paper definitely resembles tartan – a tartan shawl was created, which is now hanging on our learning wall!

Welly Wednesday was postponed due to high winds – but the PM group managed to sneak out for ten minutes in between the worst bouts of wind and rain.. Mrs Hogg made ‘kites’ with the boys and girls out of plastic and string to see what effects the wind had – their strength was certainly tested as they flew about in the gales! We are glad no-one ended up flying away!

Thursday brought our Burns night celebration! It was lovely to see so many Scotland items brought in and worn on the day! Mrs Conway had four handy helpers during each session to prepare the Burns supper of Haggis, Neeps and Tatties – which we discovers included Scottish words for turnip and potatoes! We talked about where turnips and potatoes come from, what the feel like and smell like – and how to cook them.. we said the Selkirk Grace and sat down together to enjoy our traditional Scottish meal!

The PM group then had a wee ceilidh led by Mrs Macdonald – who has some serious Scottish dancing skills! We dosey-doed and skipped together, counting, clapping and keeping the time.

Mrs Martinek’s yellow group had a fantastic challenge at group time when they had to dress themselves for winter from a bag full of different clothing items! One of our assessment focuses this month involves looking at how much support the boys and girls need when getting dressed independently – some boys and girls are there already, some at the beginning of their learning journey.. our job is to support and encourage – maybe you could challenge your child to get their own clothes/pyjamas on one day, if they don’t already?

Mrs Mushet was delighted to relaunch the Big Bedtime Read on Tuesday, joined by a sea of onesies, pyjamas, house coats and slippers! Our boys and girls LOVED coming to nursery in their pyjamas! Mrs Mushet is looking forward to the return of the Big Bedtime Read bags on Tuesday to swap them for new ones! She has lots of lovely feedback to work on and will be on the lookout for parents to come in and share stories with their children in nursery!

Our ‘Ladies Night’ fundraiser was a rip-roaring success! Thank you to Mrs Beattie, Mrs Martinek and Mrs Mushet for supporting this event and ensuring our lovely ladies were well looked after and entertained! We were delighted to make £258 from this event to add to our funding pot.. this money will come in handy to subsidise the costs of trips and resources in the coming term! We have had many requests for another and are hoping to organise this for June. Keep your ear to the ground 😉

we hope you have had a restful weekend and are ready for another busy week ahead!

Nursery News

Snow Week!!

Well what a wonderful surprise we got this week when the snow arrived! It feels like we have been waiting for a long time after all the discussions about snowy Christmas scenes and sledging – we definitely made the most of it this week! Mrs Beattie is thawing out this weekend in front of the fire!

Our week started with lots of chatter about winter as Mrs Mushet started to get ideas of what the children knew about winter and what they might like to learn about! Luke told her about storms – and this became all too real as the week progressed! Lots of the children spoke about snowmen – about building them at home, and wanting to build them in the nursery. We used a great smartboard game to build our own snowmen with lovely details added such as bow ties and reindeer antlers! Have a look in our floorbooks, around the smartboard and on the learning wall where these masterpieces have been displayed! ICT skills can be tricky to develop on our temperamental smartboard but what a great job the boys and girls are doing of learning to use our ‘pointer’ correctly – well done.

To warm us up we made soup on Thursday! Mrs Beattie and Mrs Hogg were hard at work with the boys and girls – chopping, slicing, mixing the vegetables and creating wonderful potato and leek soup! Roma and Lucy wrote a letter inviting Mrs Smith down to the nursery to taste their yummy soup – she was delighted and commented that it was delicious!

The creative area was awash with paintings in snowy colours – and the children even made snow dough! A super easy recipe of cornflour and water with added glitter made a crumbly, compactable dough for the boys and girls to play with! This was a very popular activity this week and one that would be easy to replicate at home – if a little bit messy!

We managed to bring some of the snow indoors into the water tray this week and use it to create homes and Play areas for our arctic animals! Next week if the snow reappears we are going to take our Mr and Mrs Potato head pieces out to build snow versions in the garden.

Thankfully we had one parent come along to the coffee morning on Wednesday where we discussed nursery snack and the results of our annual environmental health visit – a successful pass. We also had a few of the ‘big questions’ answered by parents who couldn’t attend. The team have collated the results of these questions – keep an eye out for it with your weekly update via email! Printed copies are also on display in the hallway.

Next week is a busy week for our nursery with the bedtime read relaunch for the children on Tuesday and a Burns Supper snack on Thursday – take home a copy of the Selkirk Grace to practice with your child in preparation for this celebration.

A reminder that our Ladies Night tickets are on sale this week – we have a minimum number to sell in order that the event can go ahead – round up your friends and family to come and have fun whilst raising funds for our children!

have a lovey weekend 🙂

Nursery News

What a wonderful return to nursery we have had this week!

The boys and girls have filled our talking books with chatter about CHRISTMAS! It seems that Santa has been good to everyone – have a look in our talking books about what exciting things we got, seen and done at Christmas time!

It has been icy this week – this has led to lovely discussions about Winter/Snow/Ice. We will spend next week consulting the children so we can plan for their interests around this area. We loved throwing sticks onto the icy pond on our Welly walk on Wednesday – this led to lots of talk about what happens to water when it is cold, what happens to ice when it is warm… Super scientists! We have had ice cubes in the water tray and even painted with coloured ice cubes! Lots of boys and girls have enjoyed making winter collages this week and painting with cold colours.

We have had a reshuffle of furniture on the carpet area which has been very popular with the children – we have had so many lovely teas being made in the house corner, games being played at the games table and the garage and car mat have been well used! We will observe the children in this environment and adjust resources/spaces over the coming weeks depending on how the play progresses – it has been lovely to see so many engaged learners return from their Christmas break!

Mrs Beattie is looking forward to getting PEEP up and running for 2018! The sign up sheets will be available in the cloakroom next week with classes beginning again on 26th January.

Our parent/carer coffee morning is Wednesday 11.20-12 – please do come along as we discuss snack, food preparation and our future vegetable patch!

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

Nativity week has been and gone – what a wonderful week it was 🙂

The staff team were bursting with pride after two fantastic Nativity performances on Thursday! In a packed out school hall, our wee stars shined brightly as they wow-ed their parents and families with their performance of ‘The Nativity’. Mrs Purdie took some photos and videos of our dress rehearsals which she will share with parents this week – we bet you can’t wait to relive some of they magic moments! A huge well done to all the boys and girls – if Santa was watching we would bet that he would have been pretty happy with that!

Elsewhere in the nursery there has been a hive of activity! Between Christmas cards, reindeer dust and snowmen names we have all been exploring Christmas and winter in different ways. We have loved continuing our daily advent celebration where we light the advent candle and share a Christmas story book before choosing someone to blow it out and move the calendar to the next number 🙂 isn’t advent a wonderful time to talk about numbers before and after? We have been delighted with the number recognition and counting experiences during these sessions.

Our monthly focus for December is NURTURED. As a staff team we recognised that the build up to Christmas can involve lots of changes for our children, whether that is the decorations around the house and nursery or the changes in routine to accommodate nativity practices, or Christmas shopping/visiting at home. In relation to this we agreed that we would, as key workers, find five minutes of every session to chat to our key worker group (coloured group) about how they were feeling and if there was anything they wanted to share. We have loved having this time to talk to our children and hope that it has helped them to feel more settled as they get caught up in the whirlwind that is Christmas!

Next week we look forward to Christmas parties and the AM panto trip!

Nursery News

Wow! Has that really been a week??? How busy we have been!

Elfie our naughty elf has been hiding from us this week! He ended up playing in the flour in the kitchen and he stole Mrs Findlays socks and hid them all over the garden!! Cheeky elf! We have enjoyed talking to the boys and girls about how we are trying to make good choices and prepare for Christmas, not only for Santa coming with presents, but also for the birth of the baby Jesus.

The nativity rehearsals are well under way! We tried on our costumes on Thursday for the first time – it was so exciting! We can’t wait to show off our singing skills next THURSDAY 14th DECEMBER 10am and 2pm for our nativity show 🙂 can you please let a member of staff know how many adults you plan to bring so we can be organised for seating! We will have mince pies, cakes and refreshments available for afterwards – please stay for a festive blether and a bite to eat!

The creative juices have been flowing this week! We have made Christmas gift bags to keep all our special Christmas gifts in 🙂 we have sent home invitations to the Nativity and have talked about what we can make for next week! We have started crafting a gingerbread house on the entry to the school – so many wonderful pieces of artwork have been added as sweeties and candy canes! Someone suggested we make reindeer food so we are looking to do that in the coming week 🙂

The fundraising stall was a great success! Thank you to everyone who supported us in this venture! We have raised over £90 and will have a final total for Monday 🙂 thank you!

Next week the school is having a Christmas jumper day on Friday – we are so lucky that we can wear our Christmas jumpers ANY DAY OF THE WEEK! We would love to see children in their festive wear between now and the Christmas holidays so if they would like to come with any jumpers, tshirts, hats or headbands they are more than welcome to do that!

PM panto trip is on Tuesday – the bus will be leaving at 12.20pm – please ensure that your child is dropped off at 12pm sharp, if you haven’t paid for the panto or filled in the EE2 form please do so on Monday.

Here are the final four nativity songs for you to practice this week 🙂

An Angel Appeared in the Sky

Three Kings Were Riding

Away in a Manger

Ring out the bells

Enjoy!

Nursery News

Technical issues resolved – here’s a quick recap from last week!

We were all very excited after the addition of a STAGE in the nursery! It has been a fantastically popular area in the nursery this week with lots of practising for our nativity ☺️ Maybe your child has been singing some songs this last week? The nursery team have been so impressed with the boys and girls effort during our performances so far – we can’t wait to showcase it on Thursday 14th December! Letters went out last week to detail times/dates of Christmas activities – if you need a new copy ask a member of nursery staff ☺️ Although we can’t give everyone a copy of the music to practice at home your child might enjoy watching these performances of familiar songs..

Welcome Welcome

Clip Clop

Knock Knock knock

Flicker Flicker

Mrs Beattie had a wonderful Friday afternoon at PEEP afternoon tea! Due to the Christmas fair (great to see so many nursery children there!) PEEP was a bit different with children making their own sandwiches, wraps and pittas and enjoying them round the Christmas table with their parents. Mrs beattie also had a wonderful bubble machine and a Christmas story! PEEP will continue as normal in the school hall this week ☺️

We had had lots of boys and girls interested in sorting and grouping this week! Sorting by colours, by shape and by different things – maybe your child could help sort things at home? Like Christmas baubles or cutlery? Feel free to share some photos on our Facebook or twitter accounts!

Another busy week ahead!

Nursery News

What an exciting week!

This week we welcomed some parents and caters to our nursery as we had our Stay and Play and Come Back and Play sessions! We love seeing the children share their environment with their parents/carers as they play and learn together.

We kicked off the week with P1 and the JRSO (Junior Road Safety Officers) to launch Road Safety Week! There was much discussion about Ziggy who has given us an important song to learn which will help us when crossing the road – you can listen and learn at home here;

We have had such interesting conversations this week about transport. Some people have made boats to sail on the water tray, while others have been drawing and colouring traffic lights! Have a look at our lovely work on our learning wall!

Welly Wednesday was a bit dreich this week! We all got wrapped up warm and donned our wellies for jumping in puddles and talking about road safety. We talked about ways we can avoid crossing roads by using underpasses and bridges. We then found a bit of unused road to practice our safe crossing skills while singing Ziggy’s song! We also practiced our understanding of red, amber and green by playing the traffic lights game! The highlight of this trip was perhaps waving at the cars and lorries from the bridge – we got a few toot toots and some flashing lights!

Thursday brought a whole wave of excitement to the nursery as we welcomed two special guests! First up we had Colin, an author and father of Mrs Martinek, who read us all The Disgusting Sandwich! We loved joining in by shouting ‘ IT’s DISGUSTING’ !! This was followed by a visit from BOOK BUG HIMSELF! Book bug had bags of books to give our 3 year olds and a special book to hand to our 4 year olds! We were so excited with these lovely gifts and all agreed we couldnt wait to get home to read them!

Mrs Beatties PEEP groups were busy today doing literacy based activities! Including using and acting out words like stomping happily and grumping! The boys and girls also enjoyed making funny faces together with their families! Mrs Beattie has a different PEEP session planned next week due to the Christmas Fair taking place in the hall. She will run a Christmas Afternoon Tea in the nursery where boys and girls can make their own sandwiches and have a wee cake before dancing around to some Christmas music and enjoying the bubble machine! This will not last the full hour but will allow parents to spend some time (and money!) at the Christmas fair 🙂

We have started to practice our nativity! There will be letters handed out next week to firm up the plans for our Christmas term – it’s a busy one!

Nursery News

This week has been wonderful in St Ninian’s Nursery! We welcomed the arrival of our kindness elves on Monday! They are going to be looking out for boys and girls who can do wonderful things – this might be involved with learning, sharing, confidence or even having super ideas! They are always on the lookout for ‘I can..’ moments but are also really interested in the I Can moments that come from home! Please share any achievements your child has at home with us so we can let the elves know 😉

Welly Wednesday was interesting this week as we discussed the changing weather! Mrs Conway couldn’t see out of her car window and we realised it was because Jack Frost had been out! We talked about the changing seasons and that we are expecting Winter very soon. We watched a lovely clip about birds in winter and learned that it can be hard for them to find food – we decided to make them food to take with us to the woods! The boys and girls enjoyed threading cheerios onto straw and mixing lard with bird seed to make feeders. We seen so many creatures this week! Including squirrels and even a rat!!! How interesting! We are going to go back next week to collect our little pots used for food so we don’t litter the woods.

Thursday brought our Children In Need celebration! We looked great in our spots and stripes – Mrs G and Miss Burns even had a Pudsey eye patch painted on their face! The boys and girls enjoyed talking about how they were lucky to have things that they needed and how their pennies could help Pudsey help other children who need him. We raised over £60! Fantastic!

Thursday PM and Friday AM brought a little bit of a different snack… The boys and girls, along with P1 have been going to the library to listen to the stories up for the Book Bug Picture Book award! We chose Gorilla Loves Vanilla as our favourite and one of the AM group asked if we could have ice cream cones! We joined the P1 group to discuss our favourite flavours which Mrs Martinek ordered – chocolate was the most oooular flavour! The boys and girls enjoyed their wee spoonful of ice cream and the chance to talk about ice cream flavours they might not like – such as worms! As in the story! We look forward to working with P1 on Monday to kick of Road Safety week 🙂

Remember Stay and Play and Come Back and Play next week! We look forward to seeing you all 💜

Nursery News

An action packed week at St Ninian’s Nursery!

It was a busy start to the week with our individual and sibling photos on Monday! Our boys and girls donned their happiest smiles – we can’t wait to see the finished product!

Mr McCurdy has been the man of the hour in nursery this week after a very exciting PE session on Tuesday where the floor was lava!!! The boys and girls had lots of fun using their bodies and the apparatus to move around the hall in a safe way, taking their time and waiting their turn where needed and persevering when the going got tough! For the rest of the week the nursery has been alive with shouts of ‘THE FLOOR IS LAVA IN 3..2..1..’ – we might be able to adapt this to the outdoor area if the weather is kind to us next week?! Watch this space!

This week brought the third and last of our stories for the Bookbug awards! Mrs Campbell at Lanthorn library has read us (and P1) the three stories that are up for the bookbug picture book award! We voted for Gorilla Loves Vanilla as our favourite story! Today the AM nursery session and P1M joined together for structured play and lots of discussion about ice cream flavours! Mrs Conway loves chocolate ice cream with marshmallows through it! Mrs Martinek loves mint chocolate chip! Miss Meechan loves strawberry! But Mrs Beattie…….. she doesn’t like ice cream!!! She said she would like some cheese flavoured ice cream.. which we agreed might taste a bit strange! If you’d like to enjoy the story with your child you can watch the author read it on the link below;

Enjoy!

Welly Wednesday had us out in our local community to see what we could find. We realised we didn’t have enough cameras for everyone so we learned how to turn our eyes and brains into cameras – maybe your child can show you how?! We took ‘photos’ of interesting things we found and kept them in our brain to talk about when we got back! Some of our children knew lots about our local community;

Khyla – that’s Bankton school! That’s the pharmacy!

Emilie – you go there for medicine!

Carter – that’s a post box for letters

Luke – you go to the doctors when you have a sore tummy

Khyla – that’s the dentist, I went there.

Shay – you need pennies to get things from the shop!

We all enjoyed our snack at the Play park after our walk! We have deposited our pumpkins in the woods by the pond to be enjoyed by the creatures in the woods! We look forward to investigating them next week to see if any bugs have moved in!

Mrs Beattie is delighted to have two happy, smiley PEEP groups back this week! The parents and children enjoyed learning together as they went over, under and through different things and learned to listen to and communicate with one another. PEEP will continue next week 🙂

Sign up sheets are available for stay and play/come back and play! In the nursery cloakroom – the Wednesday slots will incorporate welly Wednesday, more information available next week 🙂 we also have sign up sheets for welly Wednesday helpers too! The more the merrier – we wouldn’t be able to run it if it wasn’t for the support of our parents and friends!

Many thanks to the parents who attended our coffee morning on Wednesday! If you couldn’t make it buy would like to share your views there are paper copies of the questions available in the cloakroom!

Have a great weekend!