Health and Wellbeing – Page 8 – St Ninian's Primary School

Nursery News

It was our SPORTS DAY this week!! And what a sports day we had! There was cheering, screaming, running, jumping, giggling and falling over… and that was just the staff – heehee!

Our boys and girls have spent the week rehearsing for sports day – changes to routines and patterns in the nursery can be difficult for little minds to understand so the staff team took time to explain to them what sports day would include and let them practice, practice makes perfect after all. We also made wonderful coloured banners to lead our teams in with – green, yellow, red and blue teams, with some children managing to wear their team colours! Unfortunately, the weather was not on our side on Thursday – but our contingency plan worked just beautifully…

We came roaring in to the cheers from the crowd as we did a lap of the hall for waves and smiles, before we got down to business and started racing. There were a few ‘cheat-abix’ moves on show – I’m talking to you Mrs Beattie 😉 but that all entered in the spirit of the day, where our boys and girls showed off their wonderful sporting talents in front of their parents, grandparents and friends. After all the hard work was over, the boys and girls received their medals as a huge well done for taking part in a fantastic day! Then we made our way back to the nursery where ice poles were awaiting us, to cool us down after all the physical exertion! A huge thanks to the crowd on the day for making it special for our children with their encouraging cheers, words and smiles – we couldn’t do it without you all!

In addition to Sports Day, this week we have taken on board a very exciting idea for our Welly Wednesday session next week… A few of our parents have made us aware of a ‘movement’ in West Lothian called ‘WEST LOTHIAN ROCKS’ – the idea behind it is that you find a rock, paint it and hide it somewhere outdoors, for others to find! You can then re-hide it for someone else to enjoy 🙂 once explained to our boys and girls they were super keen to take part! We went on the hunt for some rocks, and the PM group painted some for us to hide next week! If your child finds a rock they’d like to paint over the weekend, bring it to nursery on Monday to be painted in time to be hid on Welly Wednesday!

We also got a quick peek at the new baby signets on the pond – unfortunately one of the nine signets had to be taken away by one of the SSPCA officers due to having a poorly leg.

A little reminder, we capture the voices of our children in many different ways.. Now that we near the end of the session please take some time to look over our floor books, planning wall and learning journey wall – these are all tools that we use which are made to be shared with our children and their families 🙂 have a look and let us know which bits your children remember clearly…

Image result for its not what you teach its how you make them feel

Keep your eyes peeled for our new school website which will be launching very soon!

Nursery News

Wellbeing week has taken it out of us all this week – in the best way!

Monday was a great start to our wellbeing week! Some of our parents and children made it along to Bootcamp with Mr McCurdy at 8am, starting the week as they meant to go on – well done everyone, Mrs Conway still hasn’t recovered! The nursery children had great fun in a session with Star Harmonies. Ask your child if they can remember the ‘Toe – Knee – Chest – Nut…’ rhyme they learned! This session included singing and dancing.

The wellbeing week continued in the sunshine outdoors on our trim trail. School children demonstrated their caring ways by helping the nursery children to complete the course.

Tuesday brought our first parents for their stay and play and come back and play sessions. Parents were able to join us in a Yoga session in the school. It was very relaxing and zen. Lots of children found the funniest part was talking about filling their sandwiches… sounds strange but led to some good yoga posing!

The P6 buddies and the current P1 classes were down to have fun in our garden at school playtime today for transition fun this week. Parents of future P1 children are reminded that only a small snack is needed at playtime 🙂

Wednesday was a whirlwind of excitement as we had our ‘park picnic’ trip for our ‘Welly Wednesday’ focus, some of the parents were lucky enough to join us as part of the stay and play/come back and play sessions. We also had dancing! Lots of great moves were displayed, and that was just the teachers and parents 😉 the routine was simple but effective! Our favourite part was the freestyling without a doubt! We hope your weekend will be filled with dancing!

Thursday begun with football for the groups – this involved lots of careful listening to the coach… And lots of lovely laughing as we played games together to help us develop our movement, balance and ball skills. The future P1s enjoyed a real playtime in the school playground with their friends from P1! It was very exciting as they learned which areas they were allowed to play in and what happens if you need the toilet at playtime (you don’t ring the nursery bell.. haha!) – this has been a wonderful experience to help our children build their confidence in preparing for school in August!

Friday was a quiet day, we made most of the wonderful sunshine (and enjoyed a story in the shade) before the forthcoming rain and stormy weather!

Please stay tuned to your emails for next weeks weekly update 🙂 transition for P1 on Wednesday and Thursday next week! Have a lovely weekend 🙂

Nursery News

St Ninian’s Nursery has been a hive of activity this week!

Our boys and girls who are off to school in August have had an exciting week! On Tuesday, there were transition carousels in P1 classes – this gave the boys and girls a feel for how they will learn when they get into P1. The P1 pupils did a great job of modelling, showing them the ropes in the big school! There was much excitement during these activities, which helps to build the transition to P1 into a positive time of change in our children’s lives! We have also had buddy visits this week – this is a highlight for our boys and girls, who regularly ask ‘is my buddy coming down today?!’. It has been lovely to watch the relationships between the children and their buddies blossom over the weeks 🙂 next week, we have PLAYTIME for transition! On Tuesday, the P1 boys and girls (and buddies) will come to the nursery garden for a ‘playtime’. And on Thursday, they will go to the infant playground for a ‘playtime’, again with the P1s and their buddies. Preschool children should bring a small snack on these days to practice eating, playing, chatting all in the one! A drink is not necessary as they will have milk/water available in nursery beforehand, and when they get to school they will be able to have a water bottle in their classroom and milk after playtime.

In addition to all of this, the P1 classes have been finalised and the children now know which teacher they will have in August 🙂 Miss Boyes and Mrs Davenport (who used to be called Miss Meechan!) are very much looking forward to meeting their new pupils and their families.

Our interest in the garden has multiplied since the beginning of this beautiful weather spell! We have more than made the most of the lovely sunshine as we have scooted, climbed, ran, rolled and chalked all over the garden! Our welly Wednesday focus this week was chalk drawings.. we love to look at mark making in different ways and chalking was one of the suggested activities for our welly Wednesday sessions! By the end of the day there wasn’t an inch of garden that was untouched by chalk! We look to build mark making skills from basic shapes and lines, to more controlled written numbers, letters and detailed drawings. Which stage is your child at? Have they access to mark making materials at home? Share your views with your child’s key worker to see if, together, we can help them build their skills and confidence in this area 🙂

Jelly proved to be a very popular snack this week! The boys and girls loved talking about how it felt, with some of the AM boys and girls keen to play with it! On Friday we had jelly play and a sensory walk in the garden. The language and vocabulary around this play was fascinating – gooey, cold, gloopy, slidy! Great job boys and girls, maybe this type of messy play will make a reappearance sometime soon!

Make sure to consult our weekly update for all the details about wellbeing week next week – parent and child bootcamp begins at 8am on Monday morning on the school field. Mrs Conway and Mrs Martinek will be attending with their own children – will you join them? Letters will come home on Monday about our family wellbeing festival on Thursday evening (6-7.30pm) – it is set to be a highlight of the term with lots of interesting activities planned – make sure to get you choices handed back asap to ensure you get your first choice of workshops!

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

Food glorious food!

This week our learning context has been food! This has stemmed from observations of and discussions with our children about where there interests lie. Following on from our takeaway and restaurant role play areas, we have had a lot of discussion about senses, how things feel, smell and taste. We have consulted our children through using a talking tub filled with interesting things! Their ideas and comments have been added to our floorbooks and a consultative planner is on the learning wall, please read it and let us know what you think 🙂

Some children tasted some exotic fruit this week after our Asda delivery – Roma knew one of them straight away, the pomegranate seeds! She liked them. Dylan thought the Kumquat was ‘Yuck!’, but some of the children quite liked the sweet taste. We think the boys and girls might enjoy a tasting session at nursery to try some new flavours and textures!

Our playdough had a funny whiff about it this week as we added cinnamon to one batch! We have ordered some lovely spices to use in our playdough, for the children to choose and use as they like. Have you tried making playdough at home?? It’s very easy using just flour, salt and oil 🙂 give it a go!

Welly Wednesday was busy this week! We have been given lovely big empty tubs to use for foraging on our welly Wednesday sessions and we put them to good use this week! The boys and girls collected materials to make a bug hotel! We talked about what bugs would like in their hotel, not fluffy pillow and beds like us, but dirt and leaves and sticks. We have a treasure trove of goodies to use when building our bug hotels next week, in the nursery garden.

Food Prep Thursday snack continues to be a big hit! This week the AM boys and girls asked for crisps – but we discussed how crisps aren’t as healthy a choice as for example fruits and vegetables, so we compromised and decided to make apple crisps! It was a mixed reaction to these, maybe we will try something else next time? The PM boys and girls were still talking about pancakes so made lovely mixture with Mrs Macdonald, for her to fry in the frying pan! We enjoyed them with strawberries and blueberries 🙂

Our weekly update contains information about our busy week ahead! We would urge as many parents as possible to come along to our coffee morning on Wednesday to hear from our Speech and Language therapist about our Box Clever initiative. 11.20-12, supervision provided for children in the nursery! See you all there!

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

Short and sweet week at nursery!

We enjoyed welly wednesday in our small groups, having group time in the nursery hut! The AM boys and girls read the Rainbow Fish and talked about what lovely things they had within them that they could give away to others, as the rainbow fish gave away his shimmering scales! Lucy said she could give away hugs.. Connor said he could give away smiles.. There were lots of lovely ideas! We then took a bit of weaving ribbon and weaved it onto the fence to remind us of the lovely things we can give to others.

The PM group were chatting about Valentine’s Day and enjoyed the story of George and Silvia the monkeys in love! Following a lovely story and discussion, they tied their ribbons on the fence for the people they loved in their lives!

Food prep Thursday was another roaring success this week with an old classic – fruity kebabs! The boys and girls are becoming more confident when using our kiddisafe knives, using a sawing motion of backwards and forwards. We talked about where food came from, how you prepare it properly to eat and what our likes/dislikes are!

The fast food restaurant has been super busy this week with lots of interaction, sharing resoruces and ideas about how we can use it! We watched a video about working in McDonald’s to give us an idea of how best to use our counter area and how to serve food, we were lucky to receive a donation of McDonald’s wrappers and food boxes which really brought our play alive!

PEEP is back this week! Mrs Beattie is looking forward to welcoming everyone for their five week block, starting today with some fun and creative ways to explore maths activities together!

We listened to this very special song on Friday morning to remind us of how to keep ourselves safe, and are thinking about this when we use the nursery toilet..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyalcd955lg

The boys and girls enjoyed this song and took part in a great discussion with Mrs Beattie and Mrs Martinek about who around them can keep them safe and how they can keep each other safe! We also loved adding our own ‘pants’ to drawings of the pantosaurus at the drawing table!

See you all next week – have a lovely weekend!

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!

Nursery News

Today we had our Big Bedtime Read launch. It was a lovely day and I would like to thank all the parents, carers and grandparents who came along some even dressed in their pyjamas. It was fantastic to see so many and I know the children really loved you being there.

I hope you you enjoy reading your pack of 5 books which you have for a week . Once returned next Tuesday you can then pick another pack to take home. I can’t wait to see any photographs of the children enjoying this new learning adventure. Please don’t hesitate to ask either myself or any member of the nursery team any questions you may have about this initiative.

Here are some photographs of our exciting day.

Mrs Caskie

Primary 2/3 Weekly News

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

Everyone took their new reading books home and worked really hard on their literacy skills.

On Wednesday everyone was so excited to work with Mrs McCabe and Mrs Stewart to make fruit kebabs. We tried so many different fruits including greengages and pomegranates. We’ve already planned toppings for our pizzas next week – you can read our ideas in our talking book.

Writing was a focus for us on Thursday and we wrote about how we made fruit kebabs in Food Technology.

In IDL we continued to read The Enormous Crocodile and then thought about healthy and unhealthy foods for the crocodile.

In numeracy we have been working on numbers to 10, 100 and 100. Today we thought about how each of us learns best to help us plan our maths learning for the term. Some children like to use technology, some like to use counting cubes, some like to play games. We were all amazed by the range of ideas.

We were so excited when the UN Ambassadors arrived in our class today to share the fantastic news that we have been awarded the Level 2 RRS Award. Well done everyone!

In PE we worked on co-operative skills and learnt two new games – Video Games and Capture the Treasure.

Our Spanish focus this week was asking our friends what their name is in Spanish then telling them our names. We were so confident in our language skills!

Nursery News

What a wonderful week we have had at nursery! All of our August starts have joined us and we have been very proud of how involved they have become in the activities in our nursery.

We have got almost all of our EE2 forms back from parents – please return these asap as our outdoor learning days depend on them 🙂 in our nursery Welcome area we have all sorts of sign up sheets next week! Take a minute when dropping off or picking up to read over them and sign where suits..

PEEP Sign up

Outdoor Learning Parent Helper Sign Up

Stay and Play/Come Back and Play Sign Up

We value our parents, carers and families very much and thank you for your continued support.

The boys and girls have learned so much this week! We are exploring our changed nursery environment and learning about independent, collaborative and imaginative play across all areas. We have been really interested in the old cameras and have used these in both the morning and the afternoon. Mrs Macdonald has got some photo albums and we hope that parents/carers will bring in some photos from home to help us fill these 🙂 we will also look to get the photos printed that the children take in the nursery.

The Travelling Teddies are back out and about on adventures this weekend! We can’t wait to see what they have been up to 🙂

Mrs Conway was blown away this week by the fantastic skills the boys and girls are developing around the snack table. Last week the AM group used pictures of food and a weekly timetable to choose snack for the week ahead. This week was the turn of the PM group. Once we chose, we then wrote shopping lists to include everything we needed to buy. Some children helped order the food online to be delivered the the nursery. At the snack area we have chopped cucumber, carrots, strawberries and bananas in preparation for snack time. The boys and girls also spread butter on their own crackers this week – which provides them with a wonderful opportunity to build up skills in food and health education. We would love to see some photos of the boys and girls helping to prepare food at home!

A wonderful week and we can’t wait for the next

Nursery News

How the weeks are flying by in Nursery! Our transition programme concluded this week with the children getting the opportunity to try school lunches in the dinner hall. They were all amazing and they seemed to enjoy eating the lunches! We hope that you have found our transition programme helpful and it has prepared the children for their new exciting move into Primary 1.

On Wednesday we had our Sports day and we were lucky with the weather. The children were all excellent and learned how to participate in a sports day, be part of a team and encourage their fellow team members to do their best. Thank you to all the adults who came along to support the children. Well done to everyone who joined in with the races.

Also in our learning adventures this week the children got the opportunity to use real tools ( under close supervision! ) They all showed great maturity and used their curiosity and imaginative skills to measure , hammer and build exciting models.

Next week we will be making and discussing what we would like at our Grufdalo tea party. This idea came from the children and is an exciting way to round off all our learning within this topic.

In PEEP this week with Mrs Beattie Group 1 are playing memory games to help with their concentration skills and Group 2 are joining in with new parachute games to improve their listening skills.

Our PM children are sharing their favourite learning experiences this week.

Rojin” The bean bag race was the best.”

Harry” I liked Sports day.”

Mark” What was good was that I got a medal and a lolly.”

Luke” The best bit was running.”

Elena” running”

Scott” Scott goes fast!”

Just a wee reminder that graduation for our preschool children will take place on Thursday 29th June in the school hall at 10am and 3.15pm. All families of our preschool children are invited along to these. Our anti pre children will remain in the nursery during the graduations where they will get a little treat.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery team.