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

Nursery News

A short week it may have been.. but it’s been action packed nonetheless!

On Tuesday, our staff team joined local area colleagues to receive training from the Educational psychology team about how best to support children in the nursery setting. We were delighted to find that we are already implementing a range of strategies to support children and have been inspired to further develop these. Please always remember to share any ideas, questions or concerns with the nursery team when they arise.

We have fairly been getting involved in our ‘Garden’ learning context – and what better way to celebrate that than our road markings being added to our playground area and our mural being completed in our small garden! On our Monday holiday the road markings were painted to give a bit of structure to our bikes and trikes area of the garden.. along with six new ‘parking bays’ – the team will be back next week to add numbers to these bays, which will correspond with numbers on our wheeled toys to offer a practical number matching and sorting activity in the garden. On Thursday our ideas came to life as our wall mural was painted in the nursery garden. Mrs Martinek spoke to the nursery staff and children to come up with a design for our mural – it includes lots of aspect the children asked for, including a rainbow, dinosaur, snake and aeroplane.. we also added a number line and alphabet. Our nursery motto flies high across the top ‘where adventure, nurture and learning go hand in hand..’ We are very thankful to the parent Council who paid for this from their funds 🙂 what a beautiful addition to our garden!

Welly Wednesday this week was a treat – a new park to play in and explore! Falconer Rise Park is the perfect size and height for our boys and girls, with nothing out of bounds! We slid, climbed, spun, pushed, pulled, bounced – and most importantly – giggled! A short walk from the school, we think this will become a firm favourite! Hopefully the weather will stay bright and dry so we can take a picnic next time!

Next week is another busy week at St Ninian’s – we are asking that the boys and girls dress in their party finest on Thursday as we celebrate the upcoming royal wedding! If you have any wedding related items you could donate to our topic table we would be most appreciative 🙂

Nursery News

Another wonderful week at St Ninian’s Nursery – wonderfully busy that is!

This weeks PE focus with Mr Mccurdy was sprinting! Not a problem for our speedy children who enjoyed having their PE session outdoors. We hope the better weather can continue and we can get more outdoor PE sessions! Over the long weekend, if you get the chance post a photo to our social media accounts if your child gets a chance to practice their sprinting skills!

Welly Wednesday was a rare treat this week as the boys and girls brought in their own scooters and ride on toys from home! Mrs Conway led the way(on her daughters scooter..) as we did laps of the playground. The PM group got to enjoy the company of a few of the school classes as they did their daily mile at the same time 🙂 we love welly wednesday – let’s hope the weather picks up for next weeks park hunt!

Thursday was a busy day as we our world book day do-over celebration! It was lovely to see the boys and girls all dressed up. A huge thanks to our parents and carers who came in on Thursday to share a story with their child in the nursery and the nursery garden. We also welcomed parents and carers to our ‘Nursery Natter’ on Wednesday (Mrs Mushet) and Thursday where we took a short time to discuss their child’s online learning journals. We are hoping that by the end of May all of our parents/carers will have taken the time to comment on their child’s journal 🙂 any password reset requests please see Mrs Conway!

Our food prep snack was chosen by Lily this week who wanted Pancakes and grapes! Mrs Conway has never made pancakes (successfully..) before so that made for an interesting morning! The AM and PM group of helpers took their role very seriously – washing their hands, putting aprons on and listening carefully as Mrs Conway read the recipe. We talked about measure, ingredients and method as we created some pancake masterpieces! By the end of the day the pancakes were fluffy and tasty, every day is a school day as they say! Thanks for the suggestion Lily, we loved it!

Nursery is off Monday and Tuesday next week – we will see you all return on Wednesday! Enjoy your long weekend 🙂

Nursery News

What a busy week we have had at St Ninian’s Nursery this week!

The top area is currently ‘under construction’ as the construction area has been created for the boys and girls to explore and play in. We have been so impressed with their focus, maturity and concentration in this area, especially due to the risks involved. The boys and girls show that they are able to to keep themselves and others safe whilst enjoying the difficult tasks of hammering nails and using screws. We have also been working on building our vocabulary in this area by looking at the names for the different pieces of equipment. Can your child tell you anything about this area?

We have been rehearsing our lovely songs this week in preparation for special person/grandparents day next week! We won’t spoil the surprise but be assured you will be blown away 😉

In addition to our lovely singing we have bee preparing some special gifts for grandparents day too. All of our boys and girls were delighted to be involved in planting sunflowers this week! We learned about what happens to the seed when it is planted in the soil and looked after with water and sunlight – we hope to see them grow into beautiful flowers one day soon!

At our May parents night there will be an ‘Art Gallery’ set up in the infant hall which will showcase the work of none other than our very own boys and girls! We have been working hard this week to get all of our entries finished and ready to be shipped off to be professionally framed. By offering the children free choice painting for this activity it has been lovely to get a feel for their interests and capabilities in art. Well done boys and girls, superstar artists!

The PM group had a whirlwind Wednesday with no less than FOUR birthdays to celebrate! The boys and girls made a cake for their friends to share and they all enjoyed the special time they had to have songs sung for them and big birthday claps done. Our food prep Thursday snack was PIZZA this week! A rip roaring success! To make these we chose healthy options by using a wrap as a base, spreading tomato passata on and adding chees, sweetcorn, mushrooms and tomatoes to taste – the boys and girls continue to love our food prep thursday snack days!

Welly Wednesday this week involved watching traffic from the bridge and takin tally marks on a sheet! We partnered up and split the responsbilities of counting as we looked for cars, buses, bikes and lorries. We were very lucky to have lots of waves, flashing lights and beeping horns as we counted and we practised safe road crossing on our way back to nursery. We look forward to the beginning of brighter weather to increase the time spent outdoors on a welly wednesday 🙂

Have a lovely weekend!

Nursery News

What a busy week we have had, getting settled back into real life after our snow days!

The boys and girls have missed the nursery as much as the staff have missed them! And we made the most of our time this week with lots of busy, creative learning together.

Our smart board has been popular this week as the boys and girls are becoming more confident in their ict skills as they use and access the internet to play nursery rhymes and songs to sing along to. Nursery rhymes provide a great basis on which to build literacy skills, we love to sing together at group time and are learning words and actions for common nursery rhymes. The boys and girls have been able to personalise this by self selecting the songs that they like to listen to, maybe they could share some of these at home? Twinkle twinkle is a favourite!

Some of our children were exploring science activities this week, a great lead into the whole school science week next week! Some of the boys and girls were using blocks as ‘magnets’ – talking about them sticking together and pulling apart. This led to the creation of a lovely ‘magnetic investigation’ area set up with the children. Can you talk about magnets at home? Have you got anything magnetic? The children enjoyed finding things that were magnetic and were able to identify things that weren’t.

The creative area had a real buzz this week! After a quick move around of our furniture we had some makeshift floor easels which were very, very popular! The children had the opportunity to draw on large a3 sheets of paper with felt pens, a great big space to fill with ideas and imagination! We have been astounded at some of the works of art from this area this week. Sitting on cushions alongside friends, in a new space really gets the creative juices flowing!

We like to encourage children to foster their skills of independence and have given our creative area a wee makeover to help promote this – the boys and girls can access all of the creative resources in the coloured trays and are developing their sorting skills when returning the things they haven’t used. We look forward to seeing what masterpieces are created as a result of this next week!

Mrs MacDonald was hard at work on Thursday trying to source some construction materials after lots of interest in construction and home building! The ‘Book of Homes’ sparked a great discussion about what kind of homes there are in the world and how they are made and built. We couldn’t believe the sultan of Brunei has 252 toilets!!!!! Watch this space as we prepare an area for building and construction, including real tools!

A gentle reminder that our Grandparents/Special Person day is Tues 20th March where the boys and girls will prepare to give their special person a tour of our nursery before singing some songs and enjoying some cake together!

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

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 – Term 1 Round Up

What a term it has been!

Highlights of this term include;

*Welcoming our new children and their families following the successful introduction of home visit/one to one enrolments!

*Outdoor learning – Welly Wednesdays! Learning opportunities in our local envirnment, supported by parent helpers on a weekly basis.

*Big Bedtime Read📚Our PEF initiative set up by Mrs Caskie, aiming to have our nursery children having a bed time story on four or more nights of the week!

*The return of PEEP! Fridays at PEEP are a great start to the weekend, keep an eye out for the next block starting next week!

We have been busy! We continue to be blown away by the progress of our children, we can’t wait to see what next term has in store!

Some things to look forward to include;

*Halloween! Parties will be during sessions on Tuesday 31st Oct.

*Children in Need fundraising!

*Road Safety Week – our next opportunity for stay and play/come back and play sessions!

*All things Christmas! Nativity, Parties and Panto!

We have a lovely new display at the nursery doorway – leave us some feedback on a welly! Let us know if there’s something you’ve enjoyed or if there’s anything you would like us to look into/change!

Have a lovely, restful holiday! See you all back on TUESDAY 24th OCTOBER!

Nursery News!

This week has seen the beginning of our Outdoor Learning days! What a day it was 🙂 the AM and PM groups enjoyed a woodland walk to the Mid Calder woods, across the bridge. We discussed many things before, during and after our walk. Some of these included safety when out and about; we seen broken glass and dogs mess and discussed how to keep ourselves safe from these hazards. We talked about when it is ok to run and when we need to stop (when Mrs Conway, or another adult, shouts STOP!). When we got to the woods we learned about ‘jaggy’ nettles and dock leaves – we even had two ‘nurses’ on the PM walk who took charge of the magic leaves incase anyone needed them. We all collected some interesting things and brought them back to nursery, including sticks, stones, leaves and acorns.

We are looking for a catchy name for our outdoor learning days – feel free to add one to our facebook post, or tell the nursery staff any ideas you have!

Mrs Caskie has been busy this week setting up our ‘Big Bedtime Read’ initiative. We are hoping to increase parental engagement and give children great literacy experiences through this initiative, where each child will receive a book pack with five stories each week. As part of our Pupil Equity Funding we hope to achieve 80% of our children to be sharing bedtime stories with their families on four nights of the week or more. You will see our lovely ‘bedtime’ area created in the nursery – letters went out today to outline the plans for this and we look forward to launching it at the beginning of October.

Next week is ‘MATHS WEEK SCOTLAND’ – the boys and girls have enjoyed exploring the talking tub which was full of interesting maths resources, their views and ideas have been taken into account and will be used to plan learning for next week. Please come along to stay and play, or come back and play next week – sign up sheets in the nursery!

PEEP classes begin on 22nd September – Mrs Beattie is hoping to meet some of our PM parents this week to encourage their attendance at these classes 🙂 a fantastic way for kids and parents to bond!

Ninian’s Natter is on Thursday 6-7pm – please do come along! Nursery staff will be on hand to chat all things nursery and have you joining in with maths week activities 🙂 kids and parents welcome!

Nursery News

What a great health week we have had in nursery. We enjoyed all sorts of activities and had healthy snacks.

We started off the week with trips to the park and learning some football skills. On Tuesday morning our AM children had their visit to Almondell country park where they went on a Gruffalo walk, listened for sounds of nature, made pictures from natural resources and enjoyed the park. Both sessions loved expressing themselves in the dancing and yoga activities. On Thursday the children were encouraged to bring their scooter to nursery and had great fun ‘zooming’ up and down the playground . It was great to see so many parents and carers join us for the daily mile and also the Fun run. A big thank you to Mr McCurdy for arranging such a brilliant week and also to the parents and carers who helped us on our trip and activities. We couldn’t have managed these without your support. All the children had super fun as did the nursery staff.

Transition events continued this week with the preschoolers joining the Primary 1 pupils for the daily mile and a measuring activity.

PEEP classes with Mrs Beattie have started again with both groups learning sign language for the hello and goodbye song and being introduced to “The old woman who swallowed a fly.” Group 1 were also counting bubbles and trying to see how fast they could pop them. Group 2 were asked to draw round their hand and their parent/career’s hand and find words about their feelings.

Transition next week will be the Moving up mornings on Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th. Arrangements for both these days have been outlined in a letter given out on Thursday / Friday. If you have not received your letter please see a member of the nursery team.

There will also be menu options available on Monday for the preschoolers to choose what they would like to eat the following week at the lunchtime experience. Please note the choices depend on which particular day your child is going. These details were also included in the same letter. If you have any questions about any of these events please ask any member of the nursery team who will be happy to help you. We would also like to ask if anyone has the talking book at home as we are unable to locate it and some children have still to get the opportunity to take this home.

Our AM children will share their favourite Health week highlights this week.

Lucy” I liked the bus”

Christopher ” I liked the fun run”

Anna ” I liked the healthy food”

Celine” I like running the best”

Isabelle” I like the dancing”

Blake” I liked being outside with my friends”

Annabelle” I liked dancing n the playground”

We would also like to invite parents and carers to a drop in session on Wednesday 7th at 11.15 am to discuss ways in which we as a nursery can improve to make your children’s learning experiences better. This will be held in the P7 classroom and you will get the opportunity to chat to staff and other parents over a cup of tea. Children who come along will be able to watch Trolls on the smartboard! We would love as many as possible to come along.

Just a little heads up on some dates. Nursery sports day will be held on Wednesday 14th June at 10.00 am and 2 pm weather permitting. Nursery graduations for preschoolers only will be on Thursday 29th June at 10.00 am and 3.15pm.

For more photographs of our Health week please check out our Nursery parents Facebook page.

Have a lovely weekend.

The Nursery team.