Another busy and exciting week in Nursery. Our transition programme is well underway with the Talking Books making their way round the children. Our AM children visited Primary 1D in their groups to take part in a Literacy carousel. They all did extremely well and looked so grown up. A big thank you to Miss Diamond and her super class. Our PM children will have their visits in the week beginning 9th May. All details of our transition programme are contained in the transition booklet which was given out last week. If you have any questions on any of the activities please ask any member of the Nursery team.
In our consultative planning with the children the topic of Fairy Tales came out as the firm favourite. Our AM children chose The Gingerbread Man as their first story. This week they have listened to the story, drawn pictures of the gingerbread man, made headbands with their favourite character from the story on them. They also got the opportunity to smell real ginger and even made some gingerbread men biscuits which they then decorated and ate! They were yummy.
Our PM children chose Hansel and Gretel as their favourite story. They also listened to the story, made the cottage covered in sweets and managed to decorate it without eating the sweets! They also made puppets of the characters in the story and they plan to use these next week to retell the story in our puppet theatre. We can’t wait to see that! They also listened to a song about the story and sang along to it.
Just a little reminder that Nursery is on holiday on Monday and Tuesday. We look forward to welcoming all the children back on Wednesday.
Have a lovely holiday weekend. Hope the weather improves!
It was lovely to welcome back all the children on Monday and we are looking forward to a very busy but exciting last term. As part of Creative Industries week the children had a visit from Andrew a musician who worked with the boys and girls on their favourite Nursery rhymes. They all did a fantastic job with their singing and dancing.
Nursery rhymes was also the focus in our transition programme as the children had to pick their favourite rhyme and perform it for the Primary 1 children who in turn showed us their fantastic work and learning in their rhymes. We carried on this learning in our water tray when the children decided to put a long tube round the top of the tray and see how the water moved up and down it just like Incy Wincy Spider moved up and down the water spout!
AM children decided on Humpty Dumpty and PM children chose Incy Wincy Spider as their favourite rhymes. As well as singing their rhymes the children also made props and puppets. They all did an amazing job! A big thank you goes to Mrs Roy , Miss Diamond and all the Primary 1 children for working with us on this project. There will be lots of further opportunities to work with Primary 1 as part of our transition programme. A booklet explaining all the planned activities will be issued to parents next week.
Wednesday was a very busy day for baking birthday cakes as Leon in AM and Klaudia in PM celebrated their birthdays. They both did a great job of making delicious cakes.
Also next week as part of our consultative planning we will be asking the children for their ideas on what they would like their next topic to be. Watch this space!
Next Thursday Nursery Natter takes place at 2.00 pm for our PM children and on Friday between 10.30 and 11.00 for our AM children. This gives you an opportunity to come along and read your child’s Learner Journey and discusss with them all they are learning at Nursery.
Also on Thursday during the Natter there will be a Bake Sale . This will be the first time Nursery has been involved with this. Our PM children along with P1D and P2B are asked to bake some cakes which can then be bought during the natter. Half of the money made at the sale will be split between the three classes and the other half goes to the Parent Council. The children can then decide what they would like to buy for Nursery with their share. We would really appreciate any donations of home baking which can be handed in at the beginning of the PM Nursery session on Thursday. The AM children will be involved in a Bake Sale later on in the term.
This week, Mrs Caskie, Miss Ford and Mrs Scott have been on a Spanish Immersion Course in Malaga, Spain. Funded by the British Council and run by LFEE , it has provided the opportunity for any staff to develop their knowledge and understanding of Spanish.
We arrived on Saturday evening and met our tutors as well as the rest of the group from regions across Scotland. Each day, we have attended classes and been ‘pupils’ for a change – taking part in active learning and working together to communicate in Spanish across a wide variety of contexts.
We have also had opportunities to take part in traditional Spanish culture including a visit to a historic village, a Flamenco dance workshop and sampling local Spanish food.
This has proved a fantastic experience for us all and we are looking forward to incorporating the exciting ideas and resources shared on the course.
Tomorrow is our last day and in groups, we will be presenting our learning from the week.
First of all we would like to thank all the parents who came along to our focus groups as part of our review week. We really appreciated you taking the time to come along and we value your continued support.
We have been continuing with our Space topic this week and the children had the opportunity to make alien headbands and space play dough. The children also made a model of Earth using a football. What a great idea! Lots of rockets continue to be built in the construction area and some children even became human rockets!
In our Outdoor learning we have been looking at Numeracy and Literacy using ten green bottles and using books to look for signs of Spring and nature. The children then recorded their findings on paper. We have continued this indoors using matching games and Space pictures as a stimulus for writing. The children have also helped make a lovely Spring tree and painted some beautiful grass to go under it.
Our focus next week will be Easter. We will be looking at Easter traditions, take part in Easter crafts and of course looking for some hidden Easter eggs!
Just a little reminder that on Wednesday 23rd March the Nursery is joining the school to have Daily Mile with dad or grandad at 10.00am and 2.00pm. If you are free to come along and join in you are more than welcome to . No running required! Also on Thursday 24 March at 10.00am and 2.00pm we are having a Sponsored Bunny Hop where the children will be hopping round the school. Parents and Carers are invited to join us for this. There will be no sponsor forms issued for this but we would welcome any donations which will go towards the buying of new Nursery resources in consultation with the children.
Please note Nursery finishes on Thursday 24th March for the Easter holidays and everyone returns on Monday 11th April.
Have a lovely weekend.
Apologies for no photographs this week as our media space is full on the Blog. They will be added as soon as space becomes available.
Have you heard all about the game we played in PE this week? It was called dice dash. This game incorporates a range of skills from social interactions to speed and stamina. Ask your child about this game.
We are continuing with our number topic of multiplication and everyone is working really hard with this topic… Miss Meechan is really impressed! Our learning this week focused on ‘switcher’ sums. Sophie ‘switched’ the sum ‘2 x 4 – 2 groups of 4’ around because we can’t count in 4’s. She switched this sum to ‘4 x 2 – 4 groups of 2 because we can count in 2’s’. Great work, Sophie.
We have also been learning about ‘arrays’ to help us with multiplication. Last week we learned about arrays and this week we consolidated that knowledge through a range of activities. One of our activities was a competitive game with a trio or partner. In this picture you can see Robbie, Ethan and Imogen using the array flashcards to create and practise ‘times’ sums. Well done!
We are continuing to practise counting in steps of to help us with our multiplication knowledge of skip counting to count quickly in groups. We really enjoy playing the ‘pass the ball game’ to help us count in steps of. Did you enjoy the homework task this week? I loved reading your comments on the blog about what numbers you counted to… great work! We listened to and sang along with a new ‘counting in 2’s’ song this week. Have a listen and sing along at home too.
We finished off our maths topic of money this week. We completed a money assessment to show off how much we had learned over this 5 week topic. As well as completing this assessment we played 2 games to showcase the skills we have learned. One of these games was an ‘Orchard Toys’ board game called ‘Pop to the Shops’. Do you have this game at home? This is a fantastic game which requires children to recognise coins, count coins, pay for things with the exact amount and give change too. If you have this game at home I would love to see some photographs of you playing. You could post them in the comments section or bring them to school. As well as playing a board game we played a game on the ipads using an app called ‘Moca GPB’. Why don’t you download this app on a device at home and have a go. Let me know how you get on playing this game.
I’m sure you have heard all about our topic of ‘Transport’. All children have shown such enthusiasm with this topic and have loved learning about a range of different modes of transport from old to new. This week we watched a video of the first moon landing. Here is the video we watched:
After watching this video we wanted to make our own rockets. We had to work with a partner to create a design, develop that design into a model and think of a name for our rocket. We then took our rockets outside and launched them using our very own rocket launcher… we even remembered to do the countdown just like we watched in the video. Check out the school facebook page for some of our rocket launching videos.
Lots of the children have been interested in cars as part of our topic. We know that the roads around our school can be very busy with lots of cars… vans and lorries too. Therefore, it was important that we learned about road safety. We crossed a road outside of our school gates and remembered the important points when crossing… don’t stand too close to the kerb, look and listen for vehicles before you cross and when it is safe to cross the road remember to keep looking and listening for cars.
We had a look at the main road outside the school and spotted some ‘islands’ in the middle of the road. We know that these can help us cross one part of the road at a time. But do you know we don’t even need to use these islands? Some of us knew about the underpasses around Dedridge. These go underneath the roads which make getting to the other side of a road even safer. We also learned about ‘crossing patrol – lollipop man or lady’ and we learned how these people could help us when crossing a road. Sophie was playing a spelling game on the iPads and found this picture of a lollipop man and managed to spell the word ‘stop’. This game is called ‘spelling bug’ if you want to download this at home.
When we got back to the classroom we created posters with all of our knowledge about road safety and we even received a certificate to show that we know how to safely cross a road.
Our posters were so good that we decided we would like to share our learning with some other children in the school. We showed the nursery, P1D and even P4 our posters and gave them some tips and advice about road safety.
What a busy week. I look forward to seeing you all again on Monday for more exciting learning experiences.
Well as you can see from the title Health and Wellbeing has been a focus for us. We have been doing our daily mile most days and yesterday we managed the full mile in the allocated time – go team 1R! Ahmad says, “I’m really fast”! In PE we have now started a new block focusing on travelling with objects, we have been working with a partner and as a team using balls and hoops. Tomorrow sees the launch of our school healthy tuck shop which we posted on our class dojo story page.
In phonics we have been learning about ‘ou’ which is from Vowel House and we are confidently making sentences and reading ‘ou’ words. We enjoyed a new activity this week which was highlighting words in a story, Angelina said ‘ I love this activity’! There was a challenge at the reading station as the children had to make longer sentences which were muddled up, Matthew said, “I’m good at this” and he was!!
In maths we revisited the concept of money but challenged ourselves by now adding combinations of coins to make totals. We played at being the people who work in a bank by counting all the coins, played a game on the smartboard where we had to do the shopping and then work out the change and we played a team game of matching amounts.
We also started a new topic, “Farming”, the children used their talking book to plan the learning experiences for the rest of the term and they came up with some really good ideas – have a look in our book when you’re next in class. They started by building their very own farm which is now proudly standing up in our library corner (if you have any soft toy farm animals to add to our farm we would be really grateful) and worked well in teams to colour all the different parts. In art they used printing to make fantastic farm landscapes, our hands got very messy! They learned about the parts of a plant and new life in Religious Education, watch out for next week’s homework which involves some outdoor learning about this. In music we made a sound story for Old McDonald has a Farm, the children had to select instruments to play for each of the animals, it was good fun but noisy!
Although a shorter week at Nursery it was by no means quieter. On Wednesday we were all super excited to get a visit from our friends in Primary 1D and 1R who came to show us some learning apps that they use on their iPads in school. We listened really well to our excellent Primary 1 teachers. Thank you so much for coming to visit us Primary 1. Please come back again. Our pre school children are really looking forward to working alongside you when we start our transition.
As it was very frosty and snowy outside this week the children made some lovely sparkly, frosty pictures using salt and glitter. We are planning to put these fantastic pictures up on the wall.
The frost and snow didn’t keep us away from our Outdoor Learning and we got the opportunity to learn about shapes, numbers and even how long our shadows were and what made them! We discovered that the snow had left some interesting patterns and we made some little snowmen. We also explored the school garden looking at ice patterns, the sun dial and how it worked and we were amazed to see some flowers beginning to grow! We thought we looked great in our new all in one suits for outdoors. As we are trying to give the children the opportunity to go outside every day could we please ask that the children come to Nursery with warm clothing and suitable footwear. Thank you very much for your support in this.
To finish off our busy week Mrs Craig took a small group of children out to try our new balance bikes which arrived last week. Mrs Craig has attended a training day for the use of these bikes and our aim is to show the children how to use these bikes properly and also receive basic bike maintenance tips which is a valuable life skill. Pictures of our first balance bike session will be posted on the Nursery Facebook page for you to see.
We look forward to seeing the parents and carers who have signed up for our Curriculum Showcase which is on Thursday 25th February from 6.30 till 8.00. If coming along there will be a welcome from Mrs Purdie first in the main hall of the school at 6.30 after which you will then move onto your first workshop.
Lastly on World Book Day which is on Thursday 3rd March the Nursery is planning on taking on a Pirate theme and the children are welcome to come dressed as pirates that day. Ahoy, me Hearties!
This week in Nursery we have been learning about Chinese New Year which is celebrated on Monday 8th February. We listened to a story about how the years are named after different animals and had the opportunity to make Chinese drums. Our Chinese restaurant has also been busy with lots of cooking and writing down food orders. More exciting things are planned for Monday so watch this space.
In our Outdoor learning we have been using our new gardening tools to dig up the soil and see what we can discover. No treasure yet unfortunately! We are planning on buying all in one suits for the children to enable them to go outside regularly to experience all the benefits of learning outdoors.
Some of our AM children used their artistic skills to paint or colour in self portraits. Our responsive planning took on rockets too this week when some children decided they wanted to make their own rockets and then continued on to construct a super big one so they could travel to the moon wearing their moon boots and masks. They then watched a clip of Tim Peake on the Smartboard. Perhaps we may have a future astronaut in our Nursery!
We had a special treat at story time on Thursday afternoon when the children listened to the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff in both English and Polish read by our Polish student Miss Suszko. The children loved this experience and we plan to read this to our morning children next week.
Today at our Achievement assembly Kerr got a special certificate for being a reflective learner as he was excellent this week at talking about how we are Active in Nursery which is one of our GIRFEC indicators. Well done Kerr. We will be continuing to discuss each of the indicators in the GiRFEC wheel with the children and make a children’s display of this. We will post pictures of these as we complete them. We have also been recording the childrens’ views in our Talking Book.
Next week is Technology week across the school and Nursery and we are planning on working with Primary 1 classes on apps that can be used on the iPads as well as building some exciting things!
Our Breakfast Blether is on Tuesday 9th February at 845 all parents and carers are welcome to come along for an informal chat with some of the Nursery Team. If you are free to come along please add your name to the sign up sheet in the Nursery. Thank you to everyone who has put their name down so far. Remember breakfast is included! We look forward to seeing as many as possible at this event.
Another busy week in Nursery. First of all we would like to thank everyone who came along to our Nursery Natters on Thursday and Friday. If you were unable to attend this time there will be more Nursery Natters coming up.
We have continued to learn about Winter this week and we continued to look for signs of Winter outside. We discovered some ice and discussed how ice was formed and how it changed when it melted. We also looked at patterns on the leaves and how the frost changed their appearance.
Our PM children were worried that the birds were not getting enough food as it was Winter and so decided to make bird cakes. These will be put in our Nursery garden on Monday. We then plan to do some bird watching. We can’t wait to see what birds appear!
We also had a visit from Primary 2M who showed us something amazing on their iPad it was a picture of a rocket which had landed in the playground. They wanted to know if anyone had seen anything but we promised to have a look on the way home. It was all very exciting.
We have also been busy preparing for Grandparents Day which is on Thursday 28th January at 10 am and 2pm. We are very excited to show you what we have been doing. We would also be very grateful for any donations of home baking that could be handed in for this special event. Everyone is welcome to come along .
There is also a Breakfast Blether on Tuesday 9th February at 8:45 am. This is an opportunity for you to have an informal chat and provide valuable feedback to our Headteacher and members of our Nursery team. We are looking forward to seeing as many parents/carers as possible. If you are available please add your name to the sign up sheet in the Nursery . Breakfast is included!
We were all so proud of our Nursery children this week as they performed in our Nursery Nativity. They were all so confident and expressive. A big thank you to everyone who came along to see and support the children. It was great to see so many and the children loved having you there.
We have been continuing with our countdown to Christmas by opening our Advent tree and are getting very excited about how close Christmas is coming.
The children used their listening skills this week when we read the Stick Man story. Please ask your child if they can tell you anything about this lovely story. Our PM children then took this learning further by going for a walk round the school grounds with Mr McCurdy to look for shapes and some sticks which they are planning to make into their own stick men or ladies. Our AM children worked with Mr McCurdy developing their coordination skills.
Our AM children have been making some Christmas decorations using natural materials and our PM children finished off their salt dough decorations. Both sessions used the Talking Floor books to record what they had learned from their Nativity.
Well done to our two children who received the Achievement award this time. Joshua from AM and Riley from PM. We’ll done boys!
Nursery children are welcome to wear their Christmas jumpers on Tuesday 15th December. Christmas parties will be Thursday 17th December for PM children and Friday 18th December for AM children. Rumour has it a special visitor may be arriving!
Nursery finishes for the Christmas holidays on Friday 18th December and we look forward to welcoming the children back on Wednesday 6th January.
