active learning – Page 3 – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

Its been a very short week in Nursery but we still packed in lots of learning experiences. Transition continued this week with both nursery sessions joining the Primary 1 classes to take part in either a numeracy or literacy carousel. The children got the opportunity to join in with a reading carousel listening to a story on the smartboard then moving onto working with a Primary 1 friend on a literacy app on the iPads . They also got a chance to make a Gruffalo story wheel which we will use to retell the story. In the numeracy carousel the children learned about time and made their own watches. All the nursery children showed a great attitude towards learning and were little superstars. Next week the children will be joining in with more carousels.

The children have continued to enjoy The Gruffalo topic and they got the chance to make their own Gruffalo masks. We will continue with this topic next week as the children have came up with lots of super ideas which are written in our talking books. Please feel free to have a little read when you are in nursery.

In P.E. with Mr McCurdy we have been concentrating on athletics. We enjoyed improving our running and jumping skills and next week we will be working on our throwing skills.

PEEP classes continue with group 1 learning about stopping, getting ready to think and go. They then got to take red, amber and green plates to take home to reinforce this learning. Group 2 have been working on their numeracy skills. They have had fun making their own skittles and using different sized balls to knock over huge tins and working with each other in order to listen and take turns. What fantastic fun they are having!

It is the turn of our AM children to share their learning experiences with us this week.

Dylan” I like being outside at Nursery.”

Carter” I played with the bricks and made a tower with my brother.”

Liam ” I was playing with the bricks and the magnets and I made a rocket. It was easy!”

Sophie” I played with the wee girl Celine.”

Micha ” I liked playing the bricks with my friend Oliver.”

Roma” I played with my friend Lucy”

Blake ” My favourite was playing outside with my friends.”

Just a little reminder that as the children are outside every day and hopefully the sun may shine can we please ask that suntan cream be applied before coming to nursery and that appropriate clothing is worn eg sun hat, long sleeve top. Thank you for your support with this.

For parents of preschool children a letter has been given out detailing parent meetings to provide you with important information before your child starts St Ninians. Please let any of the team know if you have not been given one of these letters.

Snack money is now due either £1 per week or £11 till the end of this term. This can be paid by iPad impact. If you are unsure of your payments please ask any of the team and this can be checked for you.

For more photographs please check our Nursery parents Facebook page.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery team.

Nursery News

This week our learning has centred on our shared transition topic with Primary 1 ‘The Gruffalo’

The children discussed what they would like to learn and do within this topic and their ideas were written and drawn in our talking books. We drew our own gruffalos and made some mice. These are on the wall and they look amazing. We have also started to put up the childrens’ ideas on our learning wall. We will continue with this topic next week taking forward the other learning adventures that the children have come up with. Please feel free to have a look in our talking books and at our learning wall and any other ideas you have we would be delighted for you to add these.

In outdoor learning the children went bug hunting and were very independent at making their own resources for this. We have also seen great cooperative play. As outdoor learning is every day we would appreciate it if the children could come to nursery suitably dressed for the outdoors.

On Monday we had our monthly visit to the library and Mrs Campbell read us a story about robbers trying to steal a prize cow. We enjoyed making the animal noises and after that we all did a funny dance! It was great fun.

Transition events continued this week with our pre schoolers visiting the Primary 1 classes where they all sat at the smartboard in a circle with their Primary 1 friends and Mrs Roy and Miss Meechan showed them the talking book. This book is full of pictures of all the experiences the children will encounter when they come to school and has audio telling them all about the picture. Each pre school child will be given an opportunity to take this book home for one night to give them a chance to discuss it with their parents. The nursery children were all excellent and ready for this next exciting adventure in their learning. The transition activity next week will be the nursery children joining in with a Numeracy and Literacy carousel with the Primary 1 classes. We would like to say a huge thank you to Mrs Roy, Miss Meechan and all our Primary 1 friends for inviting us to visit them.

The PEEP classes with Mrs Beattie are now up and running. We are in week 2 of a 5 week block. Group 1 are focusing on Health and Wellbeing and Group 2 are engaging in fun numeracy activities which can be then be followed up at home. All the children and the adults are having great fun in these sessions.

A little reminder that Monday 1st May is a holiday and Thursday 4th May is an In service day for staff , the children do not attend nursery on this day.

Have a lovely holiday weekend. See you all on Tuesday.

The Nursery team.

Nursery News

Although a shorter week it was just as busy for Nursery! First of all we welcomed new members to our St Ninian’s family. Joining our staff team is Mrs Brogan Conway who has replaced Mrs Craig as our other Nursery teacher. She will be in Nursery on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with Mrs Caskie in Nursery on a Monday and a Tuesday. Also joining us in the AM session is Mrs Carol Martinek an Early Years Practioner who will be the key worker for our new yellow group. We are looking forward to working with our new team members.

We also welcomed Abhay and Ameya who have joined the yellow group in our AM session. We have a further four children joining this group in the coming weeks. In our PM session we welcomed Martin and look forward to Harry joining us on Monday we hope you all enjoy your time with us at nursery.

We had to say goodbye to some friends at the beginning of the week as our caterpillars had turned into butterflies during the holidays. The children got the opportunity to have a look at the cocoons and observe the butterflies eating and drinking before we released them. They were not too keen to come out of their nets so Mrs Mushet and Mrs MacDonald had to lift them out, some flew away but others were placed gently amongst our flowers. We will be keeping an eye out for them in the coming weeks.

As part of Outdoor week and also our transition programme we went on a Gruffalo woodland walk along with our Primary 1 friends. No Gruffalo was found but we all had a super time exploring the woods. The Gruffalo will be a joint topic along with the two Primary 1 classes. We will be getting the childrens’ ideas next week in order to take this topic forward and put them on our learning wall as well as anything else that arises from the childrens’ interests. Our transition programme continues next week with the Nursery children visiting the Primary 1 classes along with their buddies to have a look at the talking books. These books are put together by the children in Primary 1 and show all the experiences that will take place when the nursery children come into school. Each pre school child will get the opportunity to bring this book home so that you can discuss this with them. It is going to be a very busy but exciting term!

On our Nursery Facebook page there are photographs of both the butterflies being released and our woodland walk.

Today Mrs Beattie one of our AM Early Years Practioner started another block of her PEEP classes. We will be putting a weekly update on our Blog of all the exciting activities they get up to.

On Monday we will walking to the library for our monthly visit to hear a story. We all love going along!

A small reminder that Monday 1st May is a holiday and Thursday 4th May is an inservice day.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team.

Nursery News

Its hard to believe this is the last blog entry for this term! Another busy week in Nursery has ended.

On Monday we visited the library and Mrs Campbell the librarian read us a story called ” My granny is a pirate ” This fitted in really well with us having Grandparents Day on Thursday. She also taught us a song called 5 little speckled frogs. We sang it really well and it helped us with our numeracy skills by counting to 5.

We were all very busy this week too making Easter cakes, baskets and pictures to give as presents to our special people who were coming on Thursday.

Although we had loved playing in our shop we decided it was time to put out some different resources for our learning adventures. The children voted for some babies for the house corner and some dressing up clothes with a mirror for them to have a look at their reflection. We were all super excited to see how big our caterpillars have become and we noticed that they are preparing to go into their cocoons. As we were going on holiday for two weeks we were all worried that there would be no one at Nursery to look after them. Mrs MacDonald kindly offered to take them home and she has promised to take photographs and videos of them as they grow. You never know she may bring them back as butterflies!

We were all so excited on Thursday to welcome our grandparents and special people to our nursery. The nursery team were very proud of all our fantastic children as they confidently showed all their families round inside and outside the nursery and joined in with all their learning experiences. They then demonstrated their brilliant singing skills when they sang for all the visitors in the hall. The nursery team would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came along to this event it was fantastic to see so many and we hope you enjoyed your time with us. Thank you also for your generous contributions which will go into our nursery funds. Here are some pictures of the day there are lots more to see on our nursery parents Facebook page.

At our Achievement assembly today Dylan received the certificate for a super first term at nursery. Well done Dylan.

We finished our week though on a sad note as we said goodbye to one of our nursery teachers Mrs Craig who is leaving to have her second baby. We will all really miss her as she has been a fantastic teacher to all the children and a very special colleague and friend to all the nursery team. On behalf of the whole nursery team I would like to thank her for her commitment, enthusiasm and friendship. We wish her every happiness in the future.

As we are planning a walk in the woods the first week back could you please return your EE2 form on our return after the holidays. Thank you.

The nursery team would like to wish you all a Happy Easter and a lovely holiday and we look forward to welcoming the children back on Tuesday 18th April.

Amazing P2/3 News!

What a busy week it has been in Primary 2/3!!

One of the highlights of our week has been the West Lothian Sumdog Challenge. Everyone has worked so hard to achieve a great score. We’ve been working at home, working in school and even had to set up a relay team in class. We were delighted to achieve 34th place out of 211 classes.

The children would also like to share some more highlights:

Oma – I liked our maths carousel because we get to self-assess our work and this helps me learn.

Harry – I liked doing PE because we were working on tennis skills.

Maya Kasia and Annayah – I liked Sumdog because you can play games at the same time as you learn.

Michelle and Dominic – I liked working on ‘green for growth’ because it helps me learn.

Maeve – I liked researching the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs. We used Google to help our research.

Brooke and Andrew – I liked watching the P3 assembly today.

Kuba and Pawel – I liked the literacy carousel because I worked on handwriting, spelling, reflective reading and guided reading.

Levente – I liked working on writing subtraction sums and subtracting tens and units. It was hard at first but it got easier.

Chloe – I liked spelling today because it helps me learn words to use in my story writing on Thursdays.

Alishba – I liked handwriting because it helps me join letters and I get better and better.

Carly – I liked when we wrote about our friends in Big Writing.

Angel – I liked my learning conversation because we talked about my learning and mummies and pyramids.

Nursery News

How the weeks are flying by in Nursery! On Tuesday we celebrated Pancake Day. We discussed what ingredients we needed to make pancakes and then the best part we got to eat them😊

The children decided that they would like to change our shop into a pet shop so we now have lots of pet food, toys and pets for sale. The children are really engaged in this learning experience using real money and trying to recognise the coins. Some are also extending this learning at home and even visiting Pets at Home to collect leaflets which is fantastic.

The children have also been enjoying outside learning with lots of cooperative play in all areas. We have had delicious food made in the mud kitchen and lots of imaginative play in our shed using lots of open ended natural resources. We were worried about the birds eating in the cold weather so we made more bird cakes we think they will be eaten very quickly. As it was windy we decided to make wind socks from cartons and material and we also used CDs to hang in the trees and we noticed that the sunlight caught these and made some lovely colours. Great work!

We celebrated World Book Day on Thursday with the children and the staff dressing up as their favourite book characters. Everyone looked fantastic! The children had the opportunity to talk about their favourite book at small group time and we talked about authors and illustrators. We also learned some new vocabulary. The children had even made their own Nursery story book and picked their favourite page in their books which we put out on our display. A very special visitor came to visit us too. It was gangster granny!! Luckily she didn’t get a chance to steal any of our Nursery toys and resources👍 Another special visitor was Szymon’s mum who very kindly read us a story in Polish. Thank you Mrs Dudek😀 We were also lucky enough to be invited to the Primary 1 classes to share a story time. We really loved going into school and getting to sit in a classroom. All the Nursery children were excellent at listening and even put their hands up to answer questions. We were all really proud of them. Thank you to Primary 1M and 1R for asking us😍

It is the turn of our PM children to share their learning this week.

Emilie M ” I like cooking in the kitchen of the house corner.”

Liam ” The Pet shop is my favourite as I love dogs.”

Rojin” I like making things at the play dough table.”

Robert ” I loved making the bird cakes.”

Mark ” We made wind socks and it showed us the direction of the wind.”

As part of our topic on shops we are planning a trip to Pets at Home for both sessions. Please let any member of the team know if your child has any allergies to pets or if for any reason you would prefer them not to take part in this trip. Thank you.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team😊

Weekly update from P2/3

Our trip to the museum to continue with our investigations into Ancient Egypt was a huge success and we would like to share our pictures. We loved the workshop when we found out about mummies then the Ancient Egyptian trail around the museum which took us all the way from the first floor to the fifth floor!

Our highlights included:

Matthew – I learned about mummies at the museum.

Aaron – We learned about being mummified.

Oma – We went to the shop and we bought some things to help us remember our trip.

Maeve – I liked when we did the quiz in the workshop.

Kuba – I liked seeing the huge aeroplane in the museum.

Andrew – We saw a stone coffin on the trail.

Pawel – We saw a real mummy on the trail.

Brooke – We got to hold real artifacts.

Harry – We looked for clues on the Egyptian Trail and I got to be a Pharoah in the workshop.

Levente – I liked when Harry was on the floor and we were finding out how to make him into a mummy.

Michelle – We did Egyptian investigations in the workshop.

James – I liked when we had to complete the missing half of some pictures.

Chloe – I liked it when we went to go and find the lion without the head dress.

Angel – I liked playing the ‘Man, woman or child’ mummy puzzle.

Rachel – I knew all about canopic jars and mummy brains.

Alishba – I liked filling in the log books.

Carly – I saw the coffin of a mummy with lots of drawings on it.

We all liked being on the bus in the snow and having our packed lunches!

Have a good weekend.

Primary 2/3 and Mrs Keegan

Nursery News!

This week we continued to make bird cake for our nursery garden, below are the instructions if you would like to try this at home:

1) We mixed together softened Lard and bird seed to create our special mixture.

2) We put the mixture into empty yoghurt pots and recycled netting.

3) The pots and netting were then placed in the freezer overnight to harden.

4) The next day we took our bird cakes outside and hung them from the trees and the fence using string.

5) Finally, we watched and waited to see what birds would visit us.

Check back next week to find out what birds we have spotted 🙂

HAPPY 30TH BIRTHDAY SAINT NINIAN’S NURSERY!

Our big news this week was that it was our 30th Birthday!!! We had a surprise party on Thursday to celebrate with music, dancing, balloons and cake! It was absolutely fabulous and all of the nursery staff and children were so excited! All the teachers from the school came to visit us and wish us happy birthday, and the Primary 1 classes made us birthday cards too!! Thank you everyone!

We would also like to say a huge thank you to our fantastic Head Teacher, Mrs Purdie, who planned and organised this surprise for us. It was wonderful and very much appreciated. Thank you Mrs Purdie x x

Finally we would like to wish everyone a very restful and relaxing February break and we look forward to welcoming our children back on Wednesday 15th February.

The Nursery Team 🙂

Nursery News

In Nursery this week we had lots of Chinese New Year celebrations! On Tuesday Miss Pan a Mandarin teacher from the Confucius Hub in James Young High school visited both sessions. She told us all about China and taught us some Chinese phrases and explained about the twelve special animals in Chinese culture. We found out that this is the year of the Rooster, red is the colour of good fortune and giving a mandarin orange is a symbol of a strong friendship. We were lucky enough to get a chocolate coin in a special red envelope and an orange to take home.

We also listened to traditional Chinese music and joined in by dancing using ribbons and musical instruments. In our creative area we made huge Chinese dragons which we were able to carry round the Nursery and use percussion instruments to create our own dragon dance. We also had the opportunity to make dancing dragons.

For snack we were given the chance to try Chinese noodles with soy or spicy chilli sauce which we tried to eat with chopsticks.

Our bird watching area has continued to be popular and Miss Brien one of our students made some bird cakes with us. We are planning on hanging these outside in our garden next week and then hopefully we will see more birds arriving!

As part of the 40th Birthday celebrations for the school we were asked if we would contribute to the time capsule. We discussed our favourite songs, films and hobbies.

We finished off the week by having our Wellie walks. Both sessions were lucky with the weather and we all looked for signs of nature and listened for the birds. Thank you all so much for your generous donations. We made £170 which is fantastic and we will discuss with the children the resources they would like to buy with this money.

Just a little reminder that we have our February break next week. Nursery will be closed on Friday 10th February and we look forward to welcoming children back to nursery on Wednesday 15th February.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery Team😊

Nursery News

We have had another busy and exciting week in Nursery.

Both sessions were super excited to meet Billie Bear our travelling teddy. This is part of our home link learning experiences. The children in both sessions will each be given the opportunity to take Billie home for a few days and share what they may be doing either at home or outside. Billie will be so happy to join in with anything. He comes with a backpack and a special letter which explains what is in the bag and how you and your child can engage in this super learning experience. We would love to see photographs of Billie and his special friend ( your child) spending time together which you can either bring into Nursery or upload to your child’s online journal. We can’t wait to hear about Billie and his adventures. If you have any questions regarding this project please ask any member of the nursery team who will be more than happy to help you.

We have also been looking at patterns in Numeracy and the children had an opportunity to make their own patterns using a variety of materials and also followed a pattern using our link elephants. This learning experience came from an interest the children had when drawing self portraits and talking about differences and similarities.

There was a lovely smell coming from the kitchen this week too as some of the children decided to bake their own play dough food and once cooled paint it. This will make its way into our kitchen in the house corner next week.

We even managed to get outside this week and enjoyed playing in our shed which has lots of natural resources for the children to experience. The bikes and new kitchen were also very popular.

As part of our consultative planning we will be asking the children next week what they would like to learn about Winter and this will go on display on our visible Learning Wall. We would love to hear any ideas that the children may mention to you at home and this can be added to our learning wall too.

To finish off our PM session yesterday we heard the sounds of pirates approaching the Nursery door. It was Mrs Roy with her band of pirates! We loved seeing the super pirate hats that the Primary 1 children had made and we joined in with lots of pirate noises! Both Primary 1 classes will be dropping in to both sessions of Nursery from time to time as part of our transition programme.

Its our PM children’s turn to share their learning experiences this week.

Emilie M and Emileigh Rose ” We loved playing in our new outside kitchen”

Mark, Kayla and Riley” We loved making our telescope and playing with the boomerang”

Shea and Lucas” We liked making things with the Lego”

Luke” Playing with the castle is my favourite”

Ethan and Jamie” We like drawing with the pens”

Scott” I liked the pirates ”

Just a wee reminder of upcoming events.

Both sessions will be visiting the library on Monday. If you have not handed in your child’s EE2 form please bring it to Nursery on Monday.

We will also be celebrating Burns day on Wednesday next week and Chinese New Year the following week.

Teeth varnishing will take place on Thursday.

Our sponsored Wellie Walks will be on Thursday 2nd February for PM and Friday 3rd February for AM. More information on this will follow.